Peer2Politics

It's a question that's perplexed philosophers for centuries and scientists for decades: Where does consciousness come from? Neuroscientist Christof Koch, chief scientific officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, thinks he has an answer.

How one researcher created a pirate bay for science more powerful than even libraries at top universities.

When Ebola broke out in March 2014, Pardis Sabeti and her team got to work sequencing the virus's genome, learning how it mutated and spread. Sabeti immediately released her research online, so virus trackers and scientists from around the world could join in the urgent fight. In this talk, she shows how open cooperation was key to halting the virus ... and to attacking the next one to come along. "We had to work openly, we had to share and we had to work together," Sabeti says. "Let us not let the world be defined by the destruction wrought by one virus, but illuminated by billions of hearts and minds working in unity."

Experts who assess possibility of apocalypse on symbolic clock say world is as close to doomsday as last year.

Popular hypotheses credit a primordial soup, lightning, and a colossal stroke of luck. But if a new theory is correct, luck may have little to do with it.

by Steven M. Druker An ardent attempt is afoot on Capitol Hill to prevent states from requiring the labeling of genetically engineered foods – made

"The cadre that call themselves skeptics, atheists, or rationalists act to enforce orthodoxy of all kinds; they are a kind of intellectual paramilitary goon squad that roots out subversion and enforces dominant paradigms. It is therefore unsurprising that, as Horgan describes, they celebrate the deep-roots theory of war. That theory basically says that group violence is a fundamental part of human nature; therefore it justifies the security state and a geopolitical stance in which we must ceaselessly protect ourselves from each other."

The gravitational waves theorist saw physics as no one else did, but if he was around today his time would be spent chasing grants or tenures

A discussion on the weaving of science and commons: what's public, what's private and the ways we understand, produce and socialize science.

ShararaTech Art & Science Mediterranean Festival is an emergent desert camp-out annual event that fosters creativity-for-change around the Mediterranean at the intersection of art, humanities, science and technology.

Lander’s recent essay in Cell entitled “The Heroes of CRISPR” is his masterwork, at once so evil and yet so brilliant that I find it hard not to stand in awe even as I picture him cackling loudly in his Kendall Square lair, giant laser weapon behind him poised to destroy Berkeley if we don’t hand over our patents.

- See more at: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1825#sthash.6uWiMDwc.dvJPQmLb.dpuf

By Fabian Tompsett in Cybernetics and Second-Order Cybernetics. Otto Neurath (1882-1945) developed the approach of encyclopedism as an important tool to achieve the Unity of Science. This is examined in terms of his long term commitment to socialism