On Tuesday June 5, Earthlings will be able to observe a rare celestial event: the silhouetted disk of the planet Venus will slowly pass in front of, or transit, the disk of the Sun. The event will last just under 7 hours, and will be directly visible by people...

A paper in this week's Nature Climate Change reinforces a really important insight about the limits of our ability to reason and think rationally. It's another blow to the crumbling ramparts of the belief that the Enlightenment, as Kant put it, was "Mankind's final coming of age, the emancipation of...

co-authored with Douglas Dechow

On Tuesday, May 22, we wrote about the successful launch of SpaceX's Dragon capsule. Since then, Dragon synced up its orbit with the International Space Station and, on May 25, berthed.

This low-Earth-orbit hook-up isn't technically docking. The space shuttle...

Research in neuroscience has revealed a startling fact that revolutionizes much of what we humans have previously taken for granted about our interactions with the world outside our heads: Our consciousness is really not in charge of our behavior.

Laboratory experiments show that before we become aware of making...

In most religions and arguably anything worth being called a religion, God is not just an impersonal force or creator. He has a mind that humans can relate to. Maybe you're not gossiping on the phone with him late at night, but he has personality traits, thoughts, moods, and ways...

2012 will be seen as the beginning of the frontier era in space. By 2030 there will be people on the Moon, on Mars, and in the free space between worlds. The first permanent communities beyond Earth will be founded, the first major products and inventions created there will have...

Recently APA recruited a public relations guy from the Department of Defense to respond to my concerns that DSM 5 is way off track. He immediately went on the offensive and (in an interview for Time magazine) made the obvious PR mistake of calling me "a...

In my ongoing effort to emphasize the cognitive capabilities of cells, this blog describes two examples of highly sophisticated searching behavior by very different kinds of cells. At the same time, I want to discuss the bewildering resistance of at least one conventional evolutionist to additional researchers coming in from...

You may feel perfectly healthy, but most of us are walking collections of chronic infections. The Epstein-Barr virus, responsible for mononucleosis, infects nearly everyone. About a third of us are infected with Toxoplasma gondii (or "toxo," for short); this parasite is the reason why pregnant women are warned...

with Douglas Dechow

Over this past week, eyes have been on SpaceX and Dragon, which completed its successful mission to the International Space Station. Remember, too, that roughly a year ago, on May 16, 2011, space shuttle Endeavour set out on its last-ever mission. On June 1, 2011,

I recently watched one of the most brutal and upsetting films I've ever seen, called The Stoning of Soraya M. I suppose the title of this 2008 film should have warned me away, but I really don't believe that anything could prepare viewers for the graphic, bloody and excruciatingly prolonged...

Short Answer: Sometimes Both.

My astronaut father regularly tries to dissuade me from chiming in on politically-charged issues. It is advice I occasionally ignore. Yet, his rationale is usually right on target. He counsels me to let the true experts make the case, not the interested but less-informed opinion holders,...

On one summer day 243 years ago, the heavens became much larger than anyone had dared to imagine. And that same summer day had made them dare and imagine quite a bit.

The day was June 3, 1769, when some of the age's top explorers and scientists had scattered...

What if there was an inexhaustible form of carbon-free, clean energy that was available 24/7, rain or shine, and was no larger than existing fossil fuel plants? Is that something you might be interested in? What I'm talking about is fusion energy. The easy joke is that fusion energy is...

Fifty years ago -- on May 24, 1962 -- astronaut Scott Carpenter blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in his Mercury Aurora spacecraft en route to three orbits of the Earth.

That trip is pretty tame by today's space standards, but back then it was real cutting-edge exploration. Carpenter...

Alaska may have missed out on the prime viewing of the annular solar eclipse on May 20 -- though it definitely caught some of it -- but there's no better place to be than the Last Frontier to see the June 5 transit of Venus, an astronomical event that only...

In 1969, we stepped foot on the moon and, according to some, reached the pinnacle of progress in the aerospace sciences. Yet our earliest and most basic aeronautical dream, to fly like the birds, using only our own muscle power, remained elusive. In the decade that followed however, this would...