Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective ...

Computer viruses emerged in the 1980s. But in the internet era, we decided not to beat viruses, but to join them. “Going viral” became the goal of any piece of content, from a movie to a Facebook post. Bill Wasik is the author of And Then There’s This: How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture ...

Long before science explained rabies, the virus showed up in folklore and literature. "The vampire myth, the werewolf myth, and the zombie myth," Bill Wasik tells Kurt Andersen, "are all saliva-born infections that manifest as a contagious animal essence. Rabies is the only thing ...

Vincent Racaniello of Columbia University did groundbreaking research on reconstructing the DNA of viruses (sort of like microbial Jurassic Park). The method was used to re-create the spectacularly lethal influenza behind the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, which killed between ...

Lots of kids have imaginary friends. Marjorie Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon, has been looking at imaginary friends and the children who have them. “They tend to be more social, less shy, and do better on tasks which require you to take the perspective ...

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. Cohen was a prominent painter; he represented ...

Quiz: Was this art made by a human or a computer?

Humans love a well-told story and scientists are beginning to understand why. According to a 2010 study by three Princeton researchers, the act of listening to, and comprehending, a narrative creates an unconscious physical alignment between the storyteller and the audience: their brains link ...

Like any other talented photographer, Bernardo Cesare combines skilled use of lenses and light with his own judgment and timing to capture striking images. His photographs investigate the history of the earth and expose the mysteries of its formation. His work fits into a tiny niche in the ...

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. Cohen was a prominent painter; he represented ...

Quiz: Was this art made by a human or a computer?

The fourth Imagine Science Film Festival (ISFF) will be held in New York City October 14-21. Venues in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens will host 80 films from 15 countries. They are diverse in style and subject, but the selection committee clearly placed a high value on striking visuals. The films may not have been created for wide commercial distribution, but ...

Saul Perlmutter, 2011 Nobel Laureate in Physics, teaches "Physics and Music" at UC Berkeley. From his course description: "The mysteries of music have long inspired scientists to invent new tools of thought, and some of the earliest scientific concepts were invented to understand music. ... Questions as simple as "Why do different instruments ...

Many scientists have no trouble conjuring rich images in their heads just from scanning columns of data. For the rest of us, it's essential to turn that data into something we can relate to more easily. This is where the designers of scientific visualizations come in. Using models enriched with colors and contours ...

Video: Earthquake simulation

When Studio 360 contributor and science reporter Ari Daniel Shapiro visited at the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology last winter, he met Dhugal Lindsay.  The Australian researcher explores the deep seas using robotic submersibles carrying video cameras and sampling equipment.  And he's given names to some of the species he's found.

DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) has just released The Book of Ice, a new interactive graphic design project that weaves together the history and future of the human relationship to the wild, inhospitable continent of Antarctica.

In this short, a neurologist issues a dare to a ragtime piano player and a famous conductor. When the two men face off in an fMRI machine, the challenge is so unimaginably difficult that one man instantly gives up. But the other achieves a musical feat that ought to be impossible.