At the world's leading baby brain research lab at Harvard University, Elizabeth Spelke's team is conducting experiments that reveal not only that humans are born with a range of innate skills, but that our prejudices are formed within the first few months of life.

Harvard's baby brain research lab

The Star Trek physicist enters the Seed Salon to discuss participation, the politics of knowledge production, and seduction with the artist/engineer.

Lawrence Krauss and Natalie Jeremijenko | Seed Video

Hubble is all grown up now!

Arp 148 is the staggering aftermath of an encounter between two galaxies, resulting in a ring-shaped galaxy and a long-tailed companion. The collision between the two parent galaxies produced a shockwave effect that first drew matter into the centre and then caused it to propagate outwards in a ring. The elongated companion perpendicular to the ring suggests that Arp 148 is a unique snapshot of an ongoing collision. Infrared observations reveal a strong obscuration region that appears as a dark dust lane across the nucleus in optical light.

Arp 148 is nicknamed “Mayall’s object” and is located in the constellation of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, approximately 500 million light-years away. This interacting pair of galaxies is included in Arp’s catalogue of peculiar galaxies as number 148.

Click through to celebrate Hubble's 18th anniversary.

Imagery from Hubble

“He determined that if they cross-pollinate, they produce more seed and more vigorous seedlings,” said Margaret Falk, a horticulturalist and associate vice president at the New York Botanical Garden. The variation is evolution’s way of increasing cross-pollination, she said.

Now the Botanical Garden is replicating this work, and more of Darwin’s Down House experiments, in a stunning, multipart exhibition called “Darwin’s Garden: An Evolutionary Adventure.”

What Darwin Saw Out Back

If almost every species on Earth was killed some 250 million years ago, how did our ancient ancestors survive and evolve into us?

Seed: Suspending Life

Kevin Warwick wired his nervous system into the Internet and his wife; now he's out to become one with The Matrix

Self-Styled Cyborg Dreams of Outwitting Superintelligent Machines

One thousand men's urine is another scientist's latest discovery.

"Very broadly speaking, the southern Chinese are the healthiest and the people in southern Texas are least healthy."

See also, Gut reaction (subscription required for full text):

Thousands of frozen urine samples have yielded new information about the diversity of human metabolism across the globe — about who eats what, and how their unique internal microorganisms handle the input.

‘Genome-wide association studies’ can link specific gene variants with diseases and predictors of disease, such as blood pressure and weight.

Here's how metabolism varies between populations

The name René Descartes will forever be entwined with our hopes and fears about the technological project. While it was Francis Bacon who originated the idea of conquering nature for the sake of relieving man’s estate, it was Descartes who told us we might truly become “like masters and possessors of nature”; Descartes who gave us the mathematical physics that has proven to be the indispensable instrument of modern science; and Descartes who foresaw that the ultimate instrument of the Baconian project would have to be medicine, since health is the primary good of life and the foundation of all other goods. The technological project was from the start biotechnological—in intent if not in realized practice—and it is hard not to think of today’s “transhumanists” when we read Descartes’ quasi-promise that technology might spare us even the “enfeeblement of old age.”

But the mastery and possession of nature is not the only, perhaps not even the deepest, theme of Descartes’ thought. We find in Descartes, and especially in his epoch-making Discourse on Method, a reflectiveness about what it means to be human and about the political conditions of his own activity that far outstrips the reflections we find in the contemporary heirs of his rhetoric, or indeed even what Descartes claims to learn from his own science. No mere scientist could have written the Discourse on Method or could help us understand the full depth of its complex message—and particularly its political and social message.

Masters and Possessors of Nature

The curator and the mathematician discuss fractals, architecture, and the death of Euclid.

Seed: Paola Antonelli and Benoit Mandelbrot

AT a time of economic belt-tightening, might cheap science from low-wage countries help keep American innovators humming?

How Scientific Gains Abroad Pay Off in the US