The remarkable ability of an electron to exist in two places at once has been controlled in the most common electronic material — silicon — for the first time. The research findings — published in Nature by a UK-Dutch team from the University of Surrey, UCL (University College) London, Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, and the … Read more

Can Science Capture the Complexity of Human Pleasures? I’m a practicing psychiatrist, not a research psychologist, but as someone who follows the literature on happiness, I’m convinced that How Pleasure Works is a comprehensive and authoritative summary of, to quote the subtitle, “The New Science of Why We Like What We Like.” It’s also a … Read more

Simone de Beauvoir’s translators and the many critics have turned their disputes into a play where each acts the role assigned by theatrical cliché… As translation contretemps go, the one surrounding French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86) and her foundational work of modern feminism, Le Deuxième Sexe, first published in two volumes in French in … Read more

Late fourth-century frescoes of Sts. Peter, Andrew, John and Paul have been uncovered in the Catacombs of St. Tecla, underneath a nondescript office building in Rome. Arachaeologists used lasers to remove centuries’ worth of calcium carbonate deposits which had accumulated over the paintings. Link