Tania Lombrozo

Vision scientists are obsessed with illusions.

This isn't because illusions shatter the sense that we have direct access to the physical properties of the external world. And it isn't because illusions give us the feeling — itself a deception — that for one brief moment we've transcended appearance to understand ...

St. Patrick's Day is my excuse to present you with the following illusion in green, courtesy of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a psychology professor at Ritsumeikan University in Japan.

This image includes two spirals in different shades of green, one a yellowish light green and the other a darker turquoise green. ...

Young children are notorious for their surfeit of why questions, often directed at aspects of the biological world. Take a three-year-old to the zoo, for example, and you might be asked to explain why zebras have stripes, why elephants have trunks and why flamingos have such skinny legs. (Also: why ...

Last week, comedian, actor and activist Seth Rogen testified before Congress about the importance of research on Alzheimer's disease, highlighting the emotional and financial burden the disease places on families — like his own — whose loved ones are affected. He noted that Alzheimer's often begins with an assault ...

Six weeks ago today, I gave birth to a baby girl. Like her older sister, she spent the first few days of life without a name.

You see, my husband and I wanted to get our children's names just right, and that meant taking some time to consider the options ...

This past weekend marked the 450^th anniversary of Galileo's birth. In articles celebrating his contributions to science, Clara Moskowitz at Scientific American wonders what he'd make of contemporary science, while Dan Vergano at National Geographic credits him with nothing short of the invention of "our own modern world."

In his Lettres Provinciales, the French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal famously wrote:

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

This sentiment, which also found expression by John Locke, Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson, among others, reflects both the ...

"The great tragedy of Science," wrote Thomas Henry Huxley, is "the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."

Of course, part of what makes science so powerful is its very willingness to see its darlings go by the wayside. New facts come in, new ideas emerge and once-valued ...

As humans, we aren't always good at remembering how, when, and where we acquire particular bits of information. But we are very good at tracking the social structures through which information flows.

Even my 3-year-old can reconstruct, with uncanny accuracy, the social structure of her preschool. If asked, she'll readily ...

As an undergraduate major in the Symbolic Systems Program at Stanford University, I had amazing opportunities to interact with scholars from a variety of disciplines, and also plenty of awkward small talk ... of the in-flight variety.

On trips to and from Silicon Valley during school vacations, I inevitably ...

The Guardian recently published an amusing compilation of science jokes solicited from a variety of scientists. They range from classics you may have come across, like these:

A psychoanalyst shows a patient an inkblot, and asks him what he sees. The patient says: "A man and woman making ...

If you're like me, you'll be spending Christmas in the traditional manner of atheist Jews married to atheist Christians hosting their jet-lagged Australian in-laws while raising a 3-year-old who likes to bake: by making vegan mince pies and trying to squeeze in some work here and there.

OK, so none ...

On a pleasant day in 2011, researchers roamed San Diego's public parks in search of volunteers to fill out anonymous surveys about global warming. In the end about 270 responses were collected from a mix of park visitors and nearby community college students. The researchers wanted to know how well ...

Multiple choice tests are:

A. Only effective for assessing superficial, rote memorization

B. Only effective for assessing deep, conceptual understanding

C. Best at promoting short-term retention of material (e.g., for an upcoming exam)

D. A good way to ensure long-term retention of material

According to an article ...

Sometimes ideas that originate in science seep out into the broader culture and take on a life of their own. It's still common to hear people referred to as "anal," a Freudian idea that no longer has much currency in contemporary psychology. Ideas like black holes and quantum leaps play ...

If you've ever sat through a (long, long) university graduation ceremony, you may have taken the time to peruse the dissertation titles of graduating doctoral students. Depending on the university and department, you'd probably find a sampling something like this:

Preliminary Measurements For An Electron EDM Experiment In ThO ...

A little over a week ago The National Center for Biotechnology Information launched PubMed Commons, a platform that allows registered users to comment on published abstracts available through PubMed, a database of more than 23 million citations for biomedical research. Yet only a month earlier, Popular Science decided ...

Halloween is a time for creativity and imagination. Children and adults alike are given free rein to carve pumpkins, decorate wildly, conceive novel costumes and entertain witches and goblins and ghosts in their myriad forms.

For adults, the boundary between fantasy and reality is typically a clear one, at least ...

Marcelo recently invited 13.7 readers to abandon nerdy stereotypes about scientists:

There are nerdy scientists. But there are also really cool ones, too. Some scientists ride motorcycles (hey, I do), love surfing and play electric guitar. We are a diversified group, just like doctors, lawyers and park rangers. ...

A few years ago, over dinner, a friend and fellow academic "came out" to me as a theist.

The conversation later struck me as quite funny. Only in my exotic academic enclave, I thought to myself, would two Americans have a conversation in which the Christian theist "came out" to ...