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Biologist Mark Pagel shares an intriguing theory about why humans evolved our complex system of language. He suggests that language is a piece of "social technology" that allowed early human tribes to access a powerful new tool: cooperation.

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.”

Which religion will have the toughest time reconciling aliens with its beliefs?

Which religions are more open to the idea of alien life?

Let’s say you discover some aliens on some other planets and you decide that you should convert them to Christianity. A reasonable question should be why? If they live on planet Earth, they could be descendants of Adam and Eve but if they are Klingons living on planet whatever, they couldn’t suffer from original sin because they’re not descendants of Adam and Eve. Christianity would make no sense for these creatures, unless our understanding of original sin makes no sense.

New research suggests the size of your car effects how you drive. If you have a big car, studies show you may be more likely to break the law. It has to do with posture and how powerful you feel.

Since Wikipedia is a compendium of information that already exists elsewhere, it reflects this long-standing bias. In addition, Wikipedia’s editorship–the tens of millions of volunteers who add, tinker with, and argue about articles–is not particularly diverse. “It’s largely younger, largely male, largely white,” Ayers says. “And people often write about their own interests, which is natural and makes sense. But what that means is that we have a lot of articles about software and famous military figures, and not a lot about, say, traditional women’s handicrafts or activists in the developing world.” For a site that aims to “really reflect the fullness of our collective human experience,” Ayers says, this is a big issue.

As the hackers dig in, roadblocks keep popping up–some common to all historical efforts, others unique to this one. One hacker, trying to separate a psychologist couple into two independent pages (“it’s like she’s glued to her husband’s side!”) has difficulty finding sources that credit the female half of the pair with anything. Another recalls making a prior effort, only to find her changes immediately reversed by the overzealous editors Hyland was talking about.

Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.

Thanks to the Internet, becoming a hypochondriac is much easier than it used to be. The easy availability of health information on the web has certainly helped countless people make educated decisions about their health and medical treatment, but it can be disastrous for people who are likely to worry. Hypochondriacs researching an illness used to have to scour books and ask doctors for information. Now a universe of information is available with a few mouse clicks. "For hypochondriacs, the Internet has absolutely changed things for the worse," says Brian Fallon, MD, professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the co-author of Phantom Illness: Recognizing, Understanding and Overcoming Hypochondria (1996). So far, no studies have been conducted on just how hypochondriacs use the Internet, Fallon says. But the phenomenon is common enough to have a snappy name -- "cyberchondria."

You might expect 10 ÷ 5 is the same as 10/5 is the same as 10 over a 5 with a vinculum between them, but each has its own eccentricities. We’ve already noted that ÷ can mean “divide the number on the left by the number on the right” or “divide the expression on the left by the expression on the right.” But it gets really tricky when people assume that a slash replaces a vinculum. Does ab/cd = (ab)÷(cd) or ((ab)÷c)÷d? Does a/b/c mean (a)÷(b)÷(c) or a÷(b/c) or (a/b)÷c? (Answer: Use some parentheses!)

The bottom line is that “order of operations” conventions are not universal truths in the same way that the sum of 2 and 2 is always 4. Conventions evolve throughout history in response to cultural and technological shifts.

‘“What if?” is a waste of time’ went the headline to the Cambridge historian Richard Evans’ piece in The Guardian last year. Surveying the many instances of public counterfactual discourse in the anniversary commemorations of the First World War, Evans wrote: ‘This kind of fantasising is now all the rage, and threatens to overwhelm our perceptions of what really happened in the past, pushing aside our attempts to explain it in favour of a futile and misguided attempt to decide whether the decisions taken in August 1914 were right or wrong.’

But hold on a minute.

If well-done counterfactuals can help us think them through, shouldn’t we allow what-ifs some space at the history table?

This is a story of how harmless choices can make a harmful world.

There are a number of problems with teaching science as a collection of facts. First, facts change. Before oxygen was discovered, the theoretical existence of phlogiston made sense. For a brief, heady moment in 1989, it looked like cold fusion (paywall) was going to change the world. In the field of medical science, “facts” are even more wobbly. For example, it has been estimated that fewer than 10% of published high profile cancer studies are reproducible (the word “reproducible” here is a euphemism for “not total poppycock”).

A new artwork painted by artist Banksy on the treatment of people in the Calais camp known as the Jungle has been removed from a site in Knightsbridge, London opposite the French Embassy. Before its removal, Google decided to preserve it digitally for its Cultural Institute Project and Street View to allow other people to see the work.