I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It's the we're-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It's exuded into the atmosphere from news media plumes ("IBM Aims to Build Artificial Human Brain Within 10 Years") and science-fiction movie fountains...and also from science research...

Last summer I had the privilege of going to Scifoo where I met interesting folks and heard about interesting science. But my story here in this piece concerns two sessions that, coincidentally, occurred back to back in the same room. The second session concerned education, and set itself to address...

Our fingers and toes get pruney when wet. It happens to even the smoothest among us. And it happens to each of us in roughly the same way. There are wildly different ways wrinkles could occur on a surface, but pruney fingers have a particular look. Mine in...

How do we know that your "red" looks the same as my "red"? For all we know, your "red" looks like my "blue." In fact, for all we know your "red" looks nothing like any of my colors at all! If colors are just internal labels, then as long as...

Where are we humans going as a species? If science fiction is any guide, we will genetically evolve, like in "X-Men," become genetically engineered, as in "Gattaca" or become cybernetically enhanced, like General Grievous in "Star Wars."

All of these may well be part of the story of our future,...

I was recently in San Francisco at the SPIE conference on electronic imaging and attended a 2-hour session demonstrating samples of state-of-the-art 3D videos from upcoming movies, video games, advertisements and artistic pieces. The general reaction of the several hundred people there was positive, and I enjoyed it as well.

I recently stumbled upon the television show "Falling Skies," with actor Noah Wiley (our kids once played together at Griffith Park, but he never let on he knew of me -- stand up guy). It's an apocalyptic story of alien invasion, but with at least two species of alien on...

Go mano-a-mano against a chimpanzee and the chimp wins, hands down -- and fingers, testes and face off.

But what happens when a group of humans goes up against a same-sized group of chimpanzees? For specificity, imagine it's a several-dozen-person tribe of bare-knuckle brutes versus a same-sized troupe of chimps....

Every so often a congressman somewhere picks out an example of crazy-ridiculous research that the government funded. It's not altogether an unreasonable thing for a congressman to do. After all, checking up on how money is spent is part of a congressman's job description. If a piece of funded research...