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"'The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious - the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.' "We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology," Carl Sagan famously quipped in 1994, "and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster." Little seems to have changed in the nearly two decades since, and although the government is now actively encouraging "citizen science," for many "citizens" the understanding of - let alone any agreement about - what science is and does remains meager. So, what exactly is science, what does it aspire to do, and why should we the people care? It seems like a simple question, but it's an infinitely complex one, the answer to which is ever elusive and contentious. Gathered here are several eloquent definitions that focus on science as process rather than product, whose conduit is curiosity rather than certainty."

""Every child is a scientist." Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson may well be the Richard Feynman of our day, a "Great Explainer" in his own right, having previously reflected on everything from the urgency of space exploration to the most humbling fact about the universe. In this short video, Tyson contributes a beautiful addition to this omnibus of notable definitions of science and explores subjects as diverse as the nature of originality and the future of artificial intelligence."

"Miller eloquently encapsulates the combinatorial nature of creativity and the constant borrowing and repurposing that takes place as we build upon what came before and recombine existing bits of knowledge and ideas to create what we call "our" ideas. And your way, is it really your way? […] What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear - you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. […] The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made."

""The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism." The combinatorial nature of creativity is something I think about a great deal, so this 1903 letter Mark Twain wrote to his friend Helen Keller, found in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 2 of 2, makes me nod with the manic indefatigability of a dashboard bobble-head dog. In this excerpt, Twain addresses some plagiarism charges that had been made against Keller some 11 years prior, when her short story "The Frost King" was found to be strikingly similar to Margaret Canby's "Frost Fairies." Heller was acquitted after an investigation, but the incident stuck with Twain and prompted him to pen the following passionate words more than a decade later, which articulate just about everything I believe to be true of combinatorial creativity and the myth of originality: Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that 'plagiarism' farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men - but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some de

"Debunking the social stigma around late risers, or what Einstein has to do with teens' risk for smoking. "Six hours' sleep for a man, seven for a woman, and eight for a fool," Napoleon famously prescribed. (He would have scoffed at Einstein, then, who was known to require ten hours of sleep for optimal performance.) This perceived superiority of those who can get by on less sleep isn't just something Napoleon shared with dictators like Hitler and Stalin, it's an enduring attitude woven into our social norms and expectations, from proverbs about early birds to the basic scheduling structure of education and the workplace. But in Internal Time: Chronotypes, Social Jet Lag, and Why You're So Tired, a fine addition to these 7 essential books on time, German chronobiologist Till Roenneberg demonstrates through a wealth of research that our sleep patterns have little to do with laziness and other such scorned character flaws, and everything to do with biology. In fact, each of us possesses a different chronotype - an internal timing type best defined by your midpoint of sleep, or midsleep, which you can calculate by dividing your average sleep duration by two and adding the resulting number to your average bedtime on free days, meaning days when your sleep and waking times are not dictated by the demands of your work or school schedule. For instance, if you go to bed at 11 P.M. and wake up at 7 A.M., add four hours to 11pm and you get 3 A.M. as your midsleep."

""If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." Richard Feynman - Nobel-winning physics icon, curiosity champion, graphic novel hero, bongo drummer, wager-maker, no ordinary genius - would have been 94 today. To celebrate, here is one of Feynman's most beloved classics, a 1964 lecture in which he distills with equal parts wit and wisdom the essence of the scientific method:"

"SPEAKING two languages rather than just one has obvious practical benefits in an increasingly globalized world. But in recent years, scientists have begun to show that the advantages of bilingualism are even more fundamental than being able to converse with a wider range of people. Being bilingual, it turns out, makes you smarter. It can have a profound effect on your brain, improving cognitive skills not related to language and even shielding against dementia in old age. This view of bilingualism is remarkably different from the understanding of bilingualism through much of the 20th century. Researchers, educators and policy makers long considered a second language to be an interference, cognitively speaking, that hindered a child's academic and intellectual development. They were not wrong about the interference: there is ample evidence that in a bilingual's brain both language systems are active even when he is using only one language, thus creating situations in which one system obstructs the other. But this interference, researchers are finding out, isn't so much a handicap as a blessing in disguise. It forces the brain to resolve internal conflict, giving the mind a workout that strengthens its cognitive muscles. Bilinguals, for instance, seem to be more adept than monolinguals at solving certain kinds of mental puzzles. In a 2004 study by the psychologists Ellen Bialystok and Michelle Martin-Rhee, bilingual and monolingual preschoolers were asked to sort blue circles and red squares presented on a computer screen into two digital bins - one marked with a blue square and the other marked with a red circle. In the first task, the children had to sort the shapes by color, placing blue circles in the bin marked with the blue square and red squares in the bin marked with the red circle. Both groups did this with comparable ease. Next, the children were asked to sort by shape, which was more challenging because it required placing the images in a bin m

"MID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected quarter: neuroscience. Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the Brain and even change how we act in life. Researchers have long known that the "classical" language regions, like Broca's area and Wernicke's area, are involved in how the Brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our Brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like "lavender," "cinnamon" and "soap," for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our Brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their Brains were being scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the Spanish words for "perfume" and "coffee," their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the words that mean "chair" and "key," this region remained dark. The way the Brain handles metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech like "a rough day" are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month, however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like "The singer had a velvet vo

"Witness testimony has been the gold standard of the criminal justice system, revered in courtrooms and crime dramas as the evidence that clinches a case. Yet scientists have long cautioned that the brain is not a filing cabinet, storing memories in a way that they can be pulled out, consulted and returned intact. Memory is not so much a record of the past as a rough sketch that can be modified even by the simple act of telling the story. For scientists, memory has been on trial for decades, and courts and public opinion are only now catching up with the verdict. It has come as little surprise to researchers that about 75 percent of DNA-based exonerations have come in cases where witnesses got it wrong. This month, the Supreme Court heard its first oral arguments in more than three decades that question the validity of using witness testimony, in a case involving a New Hampshire man convicted of theft, accused by a woman who saw him from a distance in the dead of night. And in August the New Jersey Supreme Court set new rules to cope with failings in witness accounts, during an appeal by a man picked from a photo lineup, and convicted of manslaughter and weapons possession in a 2003 fatal shooting. Rather than the centerpiece of prosecution, witness testimony should be viewed more like trace evidence, scientists say, with the same fragility and vulnerability to contamination. Why is a witness's account so often unreliable? Partly because the brain does not have a knack for retaining many specifics and is highly susceptible to suggestion. "Memory is weak in eyewitness situations because it's overloaded," said Barbara Tversky, a psychology professor at Columbia University's Teachers College in New York. "An event happens so fast, and when the police question you, you probably weren't concentrating on the details they're asking about." "

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer "language confusion," which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish - or Mandarin - for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before. Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren't many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child. But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two. Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior - where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention - to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies' brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain. Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their

"Acousticians have been designing concert halls for more than a century, but Dr. Kyriakakis does something different. He shapes the sound of music to conform to the space in which it is played. The goal is what Dr. Kyriakakis calls the "ground truth" - to replicate the original in every respect. "We remove the room," he said, "so the ground truth can be delivered." Dr. Kyriakakis, an electrical engineer at U.S.C. and the founder and chief technical officer of Audyssey Laboratories, a Los Angeles-based audio firm, could not achieve his results without modern sound filters and digital microprocessors. But the basis of his technique is rooted in the science of psychoacoustics, the study of sound perception by the human auditory system. "It's about the human ear and the human brain, and understanding how the human ear perceives sound," Dr. Kyriakakis said. Psychoacoustics has become an invaluable tool in designing hearing aids and cochlear implants, and in the study of hearing generally. "Psychoacoustics is fundamental," said Andrew J. Oxenham, a psychologist and hearing expert at the University of Minnesota. "You need to know how the normally functioning auditory system works - how sound relates to human perception." "

"A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt. A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families. The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage. The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development. At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies."

"In 1990, Thomas J. Bouchard, Jr. and his colleagues at the University of Minnesota published a striking finding: About 70 percent of the variance in IQ found in their particular sample of identical twins was found to be associated with genetic variation. Furthermore, identical twins reared apart were eerily similar to identical twins reared together on various measures of personality, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes. Bouchard's study, along with many others, has painted a consistent picture: Genes matter. The studies say nothing about how they matter, or which genes matter, but they show quite convincingly that they indeed do matter. Genes vary within any group of people (even among the inhabitants of middle-class in Western society), and this variation contributes to variations in these people's behaviors. Let's be clear: Twin studies have received much criticism. Even though the proliferation of advanced statistical techniques (such as structural equation modeling) and the implementation of additional controls have allayed some of the concerns, they haven't allayed all of the them. Even so, the findings from twin studies should not be understated; it counters many a prevailing belief that we are born into this world as blank slates, completely at the mercy of the external environment. Because our psychological characteristics reflect the physical structures of our brains and because our genes contribute to those physical structures, there are unlikely to be any psychological characteristics that are completely unaffected by our DNA. "

"A new exhibition about the brain tries to bring visual arts and science together. But it's a false premise. Art does not help us understand how the world works - and to merge the two disciplines trivialises them both"

"Humans are asymmetric animals. Early in our embryonic development, organs turn to one side or the other - heart to the left, liver to the right and so on. In rare cases, an organ may turn up on the "wrong" side with no untoward effects. (I once examined a child with dextrocardia, or heart on the right.) But there is one form of asymmetry that is common and, until quite recently, stigmatized: handedness. Over the centuries, left-handers have been accused of criminality and dealings with the devil, and children have been subjected to "re-education." In recent years the stigma has largely vanished; among other things, four of our last five presidents - Reagan, the elder Bush, Clinton, Obama - have been left-handed. (Reagan is sometimes cited as ambidextrous.) But the riddle of why about 10 percent of children are born with this essentially human asymmetry remains. "

"In recent years popular science writing has bombarded us with titillating reports of discoveries of the brain's psychological prowess. Such reports invade even introductory patter in biology and psychology. We are told that the brain - or some area of it sees, decides, reasons, knows, emotes, is altruistic/egotistical, or wants to make love. For example, a recent article reports a researcher's "looking at love, quite literally, with the aid of an MRI machine." One wonders whether lovemaking is to occur between two brains, or between a brain and a human being. There are three things wrong with this talk."

"There has been much speculation that the lawyers for Jared Loughner, who has been charged in the Tucson shootings, may mount an insanity defense. Since John Hinckley Jr. was acquitted of trying to kill President Reagan, the use of the insanity defense has become very restricted in federal cases. Arizona, along with several other states, no longer allows a finding of not guilty by reason of insanity. In the three decades since the Hinckley case, brain research and brain scans have made many advances in diagnosing and categorizing mental illness. Yet this seems to have little bearing on how society deals with insanity and culpability in the legal arena. What has been learned in the decades since the Hinckley case? Should a better medical understanding of mental illness alter our legal definitions of insanity? Or is the insanity defense rooted in principles or traditions that actually don't have much to do with medicine?"

"A new study uses advanced brain-scanning technology to cast light on a topic that psychologists have puzzled over for more than half a century: social conformity. The study was based on a famous series of laboratory experiments from the 1950's by a social psychologist, Dr. Solomon Asch. In those early studies, the subjects were shown two cards. On the first was a vertical line. On the second were three lines, one of them the same length as that on the first card. Then the subjects were asked to say which two lines were alike, something that most 5-year-olds could answer correctly. But Dr. Asch added a twist. Seven other people, in cahoots with the researchers, also examined the lines and gave their answers before the subjects did. And sometimes these confederates intentionally gave the wrong answer. Dr. Asch was astonished at what happened next. After thinking hard, three out of four subjects agreed with the incorrect answers given by the confederates at least once. And one in four conformed 50 percent of the time. Dr. Asch, who died in 1996, always wondered about the findings. Did the people who gave in to group do so knowing that their answers was wrong? Or did the social pressure actually change their perceptions? "

"When we think of brilliance we see Einstein, deep-eyed, woolly haired, a thinking machine with skin and mismatched socks. High achievers, we imagine, were wired for greatness from birth. But then you have to wonder why, over time, natural talent seems to ignite in some people and dim in others. This is where the marshmallows come in. It seems that the ability to delay gratification is a master skill, a triumph of the reasoning brain over the impulsive one. It is a sign, in short, of emotional intelligence. And it doesn't show up on an IQ test. For most of this century, scientists have worshipped the hardware of the brain and the software of the mind; the messy powers of the heart were left to the poets. But cognitive theory could simply not explain the questions we wonder about most: why some people just seem to have a gift for living well; why the smartest kid in the class will probably not end up the richest; why we like some people virtually on sight and distrust others; why some people remain buoyant in the face of troubles that would sink a less resilient soul. What qualities of the mind or spirit, in short, determine who succeeds?"

Think we all have dif­fer­ent tastes where beauty is con­cerned? Well, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy shows us that an aver­age face (made from sev­eral other faces) is almost always judged as more attrac­tive than its con­stituent faces… Why? It may be for the sim­ple rea­son that an aver­age face is closer to the men­tal idea we have of a pro­to­typ­i­cal face and thus eas­ier for the brain to process. Want to expe­ri­ence it? Fol­low this link to the the Face Research Lab and cre­ate your own aver­age faces. Enjoy.