Probably not, according to Eric Schwitzgebel, a distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside. In a new working paper, Schwitzgebel and Jeremy Pober, a former UCR graduate student who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lisbon, argue that conscious beings may be possible even if they are built from…
How pigeons can travel hundreds of miles and still find their way home has puzzled scientists for decades. New research suggests the answer may lie in an unexpected place: the liver. According to a study published in Science, pigeons may use specialized immune cells in their livers to detect Earth’s magnetic field, providing them with…
Hernan Bas has been living in Venice this year, painting tourists. He’s aware of the ironies. (He is the kind of tourist, he tells me, who started looking at Venetian property prices, oh, about a week into his stay.) The Cuban-American artist is from Miami, and he knows about mass tourism all too intimately: he…
Science advances by proposing ideas and then trying to prove them wrong. This process becomes especially challenging when dealing with the Universe on its largest scales. Dark energy and dark matter are among the most difficult concepts to test. Observations across vast regions of space clearly suggest that something is influencing gravity in ways Einstein’s…
