A scientist uses aquatic automatons to plumb the mysteries of evolution, intelligence and the future

In early 1947, Jack Rosenberg, a bored researcher in Princeton University's Physics Department, heard about an intriguing new job opportunity. As he told George Dyson, the author of "Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe:" "I was informed that at the Institute for Advanced Study, a famous scientist was looking for an engineer to develop an electronic machine of a sort no one but he understood."That "famous scientist" was a Hungarian émigré mathematician called John von Neumann, and the electronic machine he was developing at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) was, of course, the computer, the central product of today's networked society. And it's this story, of von Neumann's attempt to assemble a team of the world's most brilliant 20th-century scientists at IAS, that forms the central narrative in this sparkling new book by one of America's most talented historians of technology.Continue Reading...

When we look at ourselves next to our closest evolutionary cousins -- the chimpanzees, with whom we humans share some 99 percent of our DNA -- what strikes us most are the enormous differences. Above all, we tend to celebrate the superiority of our minds, which are capable of discovering the Pythagorean theorem, building  a spaceship, and painting the "Mona Lisa"; our minds are what take us out of the animal world and into the world of culture and history. But the contributors to "The Primate Mind," a new collection that showcases cutting-edge thinking about primate psychology and neurology, urge us to put aside the differences for a moment, and think instead about the similarities. As primates, our brains share deep structures with those of chimps and baboons; if you go even further back on the evolutionary tree, we have things in common with dogs and birds. Do these animals, too, have minds in any meaningful sense? And if so, how would we know it?Continue Reading...

Professor Juliet Gerrard has been appointed the new chairwoman of the Marsden Fund Council. read more

Stephen Hawking is the world's most famous living scientist for two reasons that (despite his own wishes in the matter) are impossible to disentangle. The first is his disability, a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig's disease) that, beginning in his late teens, has rendered him severely disabled. Most people, when diagnosed with ALS, live only a few more years; Hawking has survived for 49, turning 70 on Jan. 8. The second source of renown is his work as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, particularly on the nature of black holes and the origin of the universe.Even people with no inclination to tackle the brain-bending concepts Hawking outlines in his bestselling 1988 book, "A Brief History of Time," find his personal story inspiring. In that light, scientific preoccupations they might dismiss as arcane and impractical in an able-bodied person become a metaphor for the human ability to transcend limits. As Hawking himself says in the three-part documentary series "Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking" (you can stream it on Netflix), "Although I cannot move, and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free."Continue Reading...

Rutherford's discoveries about the nature of atoms shaped modern science and paved the way for nuclear physics. Einstein referred to him as the 'second Newton' who ‘tunneled into the very material of God’.

Rutherford's discoveries about the nature of atoms shaped modern science and paved the way for nuclear physics. Einstein referred to him as the 'second Newton' who ‘tunneled into the very material of God’.