Whether defying the dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine so he could publish a book on world health or challenging the titans of cosmology, Robert Lanza has never followed the script. It’s no wonder, then, that this renegade doctor would lead the charge into medicine’s most controversial turf: the creation of cloned …
Stem cells raise the prospect of regenerating failing body parts and curing diseases that have so far defied drug-based treatment. Patients are buoyed by reports of the cells’ near-miraculous properties, but many of the most publicized scientific studies have subsequently been refuted, and other data have been distorted in debates over the propriety of deriving …
Uninformed visitors to Robert Lanza’s home, a wooden building on a 10-acre private island in Clinton, Massachusetts, might assume he was an eccentric antiquarian, obsessed with his trove of prehistoric relics. And, in part, this is true. For the past 20 years Lanza, 58, has lived alone, surrounded by a collection of dinosaur fossils, but …
You’ve laughed and cried. And you may even fall in love and grow old with someone, only to be ripped apart in the end by death and disease. The universe leaves you dead or grieving with a hole in you as big as infinity. Can life really be reduced to the laws of physics, or …
Mounting scientific evidence points to an astounding conclusion about a familiar, everyday (or every night) phenomenon: dreams. The secrets dreams can unlock ultimately derive from the basic fact that reality is a process that involves us—a conscious observer. We assume the everyday world is “out there” in a more real or independent sense than is …
You spend a third of your life sleeping. What if your dreams are real? Perhaps our dismissal of dreams as “just dreams” is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of consciousness and physical reality. “I am real” said Alice (in Wonderland). “If I wasn’t real, I shouldn’t be able to cry.” “I hope you …
Continue reading “Are Dreams An Extension Of Physical Reality?”
When I was young, I stayed at my neighbor’s house. They had a grandfather clock. Between the tick and the tock of the pendulum, I lay awake thinking about the perverse nature of time. Mr. O’Donnell is gone now. His wife Barbara, now in her nineties, greets me with her cane when I go back …
Continue reading “Is Death the End? Experiments Suggest You Create Time”
You keep staring at the repair man. His words are starting to sink in. The fabulous and expensive generator you bought a few years ago to keep the lights burning during storms and power failures needs a major repair. “A head gasket?” You echo the phrase he just used, fearing that it has a pricey …
Continue reading “How Your Mind Really Works—Quantum Physics, Mayonnaise & the Mystery of Red”
“We patronize [the animals] for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err.” —Henry Beston It’s natural to be people-centric when exploring consciousness. We’re all drawn toward the familiar. But we’re just beginning to understand our own human consciousness, making it surely …
Continue reading “The Most Amazing Things About Animal Consciousness”
Will kind people be rewarded for their good deeds? Will the wicked be punished? Yes, according to a new interpretation of recent experiments. Although our science is too primitive for us to fully comprehend, there is a direct and proportional price to pay for any act of cruelty or injustice. Science suggests that there are …
Continue reading “Judgement Day is Coming. Science Suggests Justice Is Inescapable”
