Into the Uncanny Valley
What We Know / by / November 16, 2009
New findings shed light on a century’s worth of bizarre explanations for the eerie feeling we get around lifelike robots.
Now In Ideas
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What Life Leaves Behind
The search for life beyond our pale blue dot is fraught with dashed hopes. Will the chemical and mineral fingerprints of Earthly organisms apply on other worlds?
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Sweet Obesity
As obesity rates soar, Americans are consuming more low-calorie artificial sweeteners. But do artificial sweeteners actually help people lose weight?
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Overhyped Placebos of Doom?
Despite centuries of investigation, scientists still have much to learn about the origins and meaning of the placebo effect.
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Saturn’s Strange Children
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A Writing Revolution
Nearly universal literacy is a defining characteristic of today’s modern civilization; nearly universal authorship will shape tomorrow's.
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Up the Cosmic Distance Ladder
The development of astronomy can be seen as a millennia-long quest to measure and know the true scale of the natural world.
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Evolved for Extinction?
Could the novel evolutionary adaptations of animals like the Galapagos tortoise and the Komodo dragon actually leave these species more vulnerable to extinction?
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Folding Our Way to a Revolution
With a few strands of nucleic acids and some ingenious programming, DNA origami is remaking nanotechnology, from drug delivery to chip design.
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Microbial Warfare
Antibiotic resistance is more than just a medical scourge; it’s also a window into a war microbes have been waging against each other for hundreds of millions of years.
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Our Shifting Urban Landscape
Urban ecologist James Danoff-Burg takes us into the field to demonstrate the tools of analyzing the biodiversity of human-altered ecosystems.
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Industrial-Strength Bias
The pharmaceutical industry spends millions of dollars developing drugs and millions more swaying the opinions of physicians and the public. Can this imperfect system be reformed?
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The eerie emotional response brought on by near-duplicates of our selves raises interesting questions about perception and expectations.
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Probing into Depression
Deep brain stimulation, already established as a treatment for stubborn Parkinson’s disease, may also be useful as a therapy for drug-resistant clinical depression.
Featured Blogger
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Mars: A Teeming Past?
Questions of extraterrestrial life rest on theories of Martian history.
Now on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM
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Innovation
Let There Be Light
Astronomers will soon find scores of Earth-sized exoplanets, but imaging them may be decades away. That is, unless NASA decides to build a starshade.
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Ideas
Into the Uncanny Valley
New findings shed light on a century’s worth of bizarre explanations for the eerie feeling we get around lifelike robots.
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World
Signs from Above
The release of an apocalyptic movie prompts NASA to debunk planetary rumors, fowl play shuts down the LHC, and the Catholic Church discusses alien life.
