Guest Thinkers — September 1, 2010

Blogging update

My blogging frequency might be a little scattershot for the next few weeks thanks to the American Geophysical Union Winter Meeting in San Francisco (if you’re at the meeting, you can always hear me talk about rhyolite genesis in New Zealand) and then the holidays. I will be experimenting with blogging from my new iPod Touch during the meeting if I hear something interest – yes, live-blogging a geology meeting, is this a first? – but that might also end up being an abysmal failure. I suppose it is the closest I’ll come to live-blogging the other Winter Meeting …

a computer generated image of a human brain.

Thinking

The great free will debate featuring Michio Kaku and Steven Pinker

Who — or what — really controls your mind?

Building destroyed by the Halifax Explosion. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

The Past

The largest accidental explosion of all time

More than a century ago, Halifax suffered an accidental blast one-fifth the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

a collage of photos of a man with a hat and a book.

High Culture

6 great books with wildly unreliable narrators

Dive into the twisted truths and concealed realities told by literature’s most unreliable narrators.

a group of five matches on a pink background.

The Well

Signs you’re burned out — and how to bounce back

If you don’t feel better after the weekend, the “burnout paradox” could explain why.

▸

7 min

—

with

Laurie Santos

Starts With A Bang

The trick to instantly identifying JWST images

If you can identify a foreground star, the spike patterns are a dead giveaway as to whether it’s a JWST image or any other observatory.

Up Next

Guest Thinkers

Keeping an eye on Redoubt

nn Redoubt Volcano, in Alaska, is one of the more troublesome volcanoes in the state. Not only is it relatively close to population centers, but it also lies directly within […]