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The examination to become a London cabby is possibly the most difficult test in the world — demanding years of study to memorize the labyrinthine city’s 25,000 streets and any business or landmark on them. As GPS and Uber imperil this tradition, is there an argument for learning as an end in itself?

Which is where the Knowledge comes in. It is a weird city’s weird solution to the riddle of itself, a municipal training program whose graduates are both transit workers and Gnostics: chauffeurs taught by the government to know the unknowable.

The brains of London taxi drivers have attracted scholarly attention. Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at University College London, has spent 15 years studying cabbies and Knowledge boys. She has discovered that the posterior hippocampus, the area of the brain known to be important for memory, is bigger in London taxi drivers than in most people, and that a successful Knowledge candidate’s posterior hippocampus enlarges as he progresses through the test.

Do some scientists hold on to a belief longer than they should? Or, more provocatively phrased, when does a scientific belief become an article of faith?

This kind of posture, when there is a persistent holding on to a belief that is continually contradicted by facts, can only be called faith. In the quantum case, it's faith in an ordered, rational nature, even if it reveals itself through random behavior. "God doesn't play dice," wrote Einstein to his colleague Max Born. His conviction led him and others to look for theories that could explain the quantum probabilities as manifestations of a deeper order. And they failed. (And we now know that this randomness will not go away, being the very essence of quantum phenomena.) There is, however, an essential difference between religious faith and scientific faith: dogma. In science, dogma is untenable. Sooner or later, even the deepest ingrained ideas — if proven wrong — must collapse under the weight of evidence. A scientist who holds on to an incorrect theory or hypothesis makes for a sad figure. In religion, given that evidence is either elusive or irrelevant, faith is always viable.

What is the sky worth? This sounds like a philosophical question, but it might become a more concrete one. A report released last week by the National Research Council called for research into reversing climate change through a process called albedo modification: reflecting sunlight away from earth by, for instance, spraying aerosols into the atmosphere. Such a process could, some say, change the appearance of the sky — and that in turn could affect everything from our physical health to the way we see ourselves. If albedo modification were actually implemented, Alan Robock, a professor of environmental sciences at Rutgers, told Joel Achenbach at The Washington Post: “You’d get whiter skies. People wouldn’t have blue skies anymore.” And, he added, “astronomers wouldn’t be happy, because you’d have a cloud up there permanently. It’d be hard to see the Milky Way anymore.”

The magnitude of false positives for medical tests—a positive test for a condition that a patient does not actually have—is something that is not well understood, even by members of the medical community. We should remember this, as the United States prepares to lock away potential scores of individuals who test positive for Ebola. Many observers do not realize just how many people may spend some time in quarantine when they do not have the dreaded disease.

The cognitive psychologist Max Gigerenzer once asked 24 physicians the following hypothetical question, and only two got it right: A test for breast cancer is 90% accurate in identifying patients who actually have breast cancer, and 93% accurate in producing negative results for patients without breast cancer. The incidence of breast cancer in the population is 0.8%. What is the probability that a person who tests positive for breast cancer actually has the disease? Think you know the answer? Many of the physicians in Gigerenzer’s study said there was a 90% probability that a now-terrified patient flagged for breast cancer is an actual victim of the disease. However, the correct probability is less than 10%.

Fear, arriving in layers in which genetic legacy converges with personal experience, is vital to our survival. When we freeze, stop in our tracks or take flight, it is a biological response to what we sense as near and present danger. All the same, it observes its own absurd hierarchy, in which we often harbor an abiding anxiety for the wrong things.

Except that we do choose, and what we choose are generally the ordinary fears such as heights, public speaking, insects, reptiles

The biologist E. O. Wilson has observed that while we fear snakes, spiders, darkness, open spaces and closed spaces, we do not fear the more likely instruments of danger — knives, guns, cars, electrical sockets — because, he says, “our species has not been exposed to these lethal agents long enough in evolutionary time to have acquired the predisposing genes that ensure automatic avoidance.” Which is to say, fear, real fear, deep fear, the kind that changes our habits and actions, is not something on which we are likely to follow sensible instruction.

An Afghan artist has been forced into hiding after receiving death threats for dressing in a metal suit featuring exaggerated breasts and buttocks. Kubra Khademi wore the unusual armour in a performance on the streets of Kabul to highlight the problems of sexual harassment faced by women. She had hoped to make a walk lasting for 10 minutes but in the event was forced back into her car by an angry mob of men after only eight minutes. The men threw things and even children were shouting at her.

By the late ‘90s, trolley problems had fallen out of fashion. Many philosophers questioned the value of the conclusions reached by analyzing a situation so bizarre and specific.

It wasn’t clear trolleys could ever find a life out of the pages of academic journals until one philosophy graduate student, Joshua Greene, revived them with the modern techniques of neuroscience.

The ethicist Peter Singer cites Greene's research to support some of his positions about why we ought to make greater sacrifices for problems that may seem distant, like world poverty or a disease raging halfway around the globe.

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) got it wrong. Our solar system has 10 planets. As NASA's New Horizons spacecraft glides its way to the cold outer reaches of our solar system to take the first-ever up-close look at Pluto, the time is right to revise the International Astronomical Union (IAU)'s 2006 definition of a planet, which resulted in Pluto's "demotion" from planet to ambiguous dwarf-planet status.

It’s an intuitive claim, but also a profound one. It asserts that the benefits of bilingualism extend well beyond the realm of language, and into skills that we use in every aspect of our lives. This view is now widespread, heralded by a large community of scientists, promoted in books and magazines, and pushed by advocacy organizations.

A landmark 2015 report that cast doubt on the results of dozens of published psychology studies has exposed deep divisions in the field, serving as a reality check for many working researchers but as an affront to others who continue to insist the original research was sound. On Thursday, a group of four researchers publicly challenged the report, arguing that it was statistically flawed and, as a result, wrong.The 2015 report, called the Reproducibility Project, found that less than 40 studies in a sample of 100 psychology papers in leading journals held up when retested by an independent team. The new critique by the four researchers countered that when that team’s statistical methodology was adjusted, the rate was closer to 100 percent.

We tell lies to one another every day. But when we commit other acts that are generally believed to be immoral, like cruelty and theft, we do not seek to justify them. We either deny that the acts we committed are appropriately described by these terms, or we feel guilt or remorse. But many of us are prepared to defend our lies: indeed, to advocate their general use.

Nevertheless, it is my claim that we could not lead our lives if we never told lies — or that if we could it would be a much worse life. But I would like to invite your own views on this to begin a dialog. Here is a list of lies that I believe to be either permissible, or, in some cases, obligatory. Readers will certainly disagree with me about some, perhaps many, of these cases. But such disagreement should not be the end of the discussion. I invite your reflection on why you disagree.

It’s a consistency machine, really, is what he’s saying, and there’s all these ways that we’re looking for consistency. We need to establish order after experiencing disorder, and yes, it’s driven by the need for closure.And it’s simply because the world is incredibly complex. The psychologist Jordan Peterson calls this the miracle of simplification. There’s just—there’s too much. So we need to constantly be reducing non-identical things to identical things, according to our preconceptions. Also we have to act. “Do I do A or B?”—there has to be some mechanism that makes us want to resolve that. Otherwise we would just deliberate forever, we would never act.

I am a theoretical neuroscientist. I study models of brain circuits, precisely the sort of models that would be needed to try to reconstruct or emulate a functioning brain from a detailed knowledge of its structure. I don’t in principle see any reason that what I’ve described could not someday, in the very far future, be achieved (though it’s an active field of philosophical debate). But to accomplish this, these future scientists would need to know details of staggering complexity about the brain’s structure, details quite likely far beyond what any method today could preserve in a dead brain.