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Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind [More]

Theoretical physicist Paul Steinhardt did not expect to spend last summer travelling across spongy tundra to a remote gold-mining region in north-eastern Russia. But that is where he spent three weeks tracing the origins of the world’s only known natural example of a quasicrystal--an exotic type of structure discovered in 1982 in a synthetic material by Dan Shechtman, a materials scientist at the Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa who netted the 2011 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the finding.

"Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science," ASU Foundation Professor and Director of the Origins Project Lawrence M. Krauss' recent book about a legendary and sometimes very public modern physicist, has been chosen as the 2011 Book of the Year by Physics World magazine in the UK.

Help researchers use bioinformatics to better study the origins of certain genetic diseases [More]

Scientists at the world's largest atom smasher have new data that shows with greater certainty where to find a long-sought theoretical particle that would help explain the origins of the universe.

Evidence of child abuse, including child pornography, is often readily available via the Web thanks to peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing sites. BitTorrent software poses a particular problem for stopping the trade of these illicit images because it breaks the files into pieces and sends them from one computer to the next via different paths without passing through any centralized servers. This has for the most part rendered cops and security experts powerless to trace the origins of the files and catch the predators.

Physicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a theory that describes, in a unified manner, the coexistence of liquid and pinned solid phases of electrons in two dimensions under the influence of a magnetic field.

“The human genome was sequenced, and in the process of moving that forward the technology that was developed was incredible. And because of their efforts in the human genome, that technology is available to folks like us.” Northern Arizona University’s Paul Keim at the ScienceWriters2011 conference. The ability to compare genomes is a powerful tool for identifying the origins of a natural disease outbreak or bioterrorism

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, is the author of the best-selling books, “How the Mind Works,” and “The Blank Slate.” But he is also a public intellectual, devoted to bringing the ideas of academia to questions of broad public interest. His latest work is an ambitious attempt to understand the origins, history--and perhaps the future--of human violence.

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the introduction of the new book Ordinary Geniuses: Max Delbr

We are prejudiced against all kinds of other people, based on superficial physical features: We react negatively to facial disfigurement; we avoid sitting next to people who are obese, or old, or in a wheelchair; we favor familiar folks over folks that are foreign. If I asked you why these prejudices exist and what one can do to eliminate them, your answer probably wouldn't involve the words "infectious disease." Perhaps it should.

How do you reboot the concept of a reboot? With a director who values originality, leadership, a strong team, and the power of rabid fans to say whatever the hell they want (as long as they're saying something). Sound like any successful entrepreneurs you know

Editor's note: Below is an excerpt from QUANTUM MAN: Richard Feynman's Life in Science (W. W