Black holes are mysterious chasms so destructive and unforgiving that not even light can escape their deadly wrath. As the astrophysicist Caleb Scharf reveals in Gravity’s Engines (Scientific American), these chasms in space-time don’t just vacuum up everything that comes near them; they also spit out huge beams and clouds of matter — black holes blow bubbles. With clarity [...]

Dr. Tom Beer of the OHSU Knight Cancer Institute and co-author Larry Axmaker, Ed.D. will discuss their new book,Cancer Clinical Trials: A Commonsense Guide to Experimental Cancer Therapies and Clinical Trials (Diamedica). Beer, a renowned prostate cancer expert, and Axmaker, a prostate cancer survivor, say they designed this book to be the definitive guide for anyone considering participation [...]

From Giulio Tononi, one of the most original and influential neuroscientists at work today, comes Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to Soul (Pantheon). An exploration of consciousness in which the latest science is portrayed in a dazzlingly imaginative, lavishly illustrated narrative. Not since Godel, Escher, Bach has there been a book that interweaves science, art, and the [...]

The Low-Residency MFA in Visual Studies presents a lecture by neuroscientist Brian Dunn. Brian Dunn is an editor, educator, and researcher in the field of human affective neuroscience. He and his colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify the neural correlates of human emotional experiences. Since 1994, he directly collaborates with studio and recording artists on the [...]

How Would Nature Educate? Learn to Inspire Your Students with Biomimicry at the 6th Annual Education Summit From college research labs to elementary school classrooms to museum exhibit halls, educators are talking about biomimicry, a new discipline that provides students with a hopeful way of learning about today’s sustainability challenges. This spring, educators who are [...]

In physics, as in science generally, most phenomena can be understood in more than one way: the gas in an engine obeys the laws of thermodynamics and also those of the motion of its molecules. The different theories correspond to different levels of description. These must overlap, but understanding their consilience is far from straightforward [...]

Dr. John Cacioppo University of Chicago John Cacioppo is the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at The University of Chicago, the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience, and the Director of the Arete Initiative of the Office of the Vice President for Research and National Laboratories at the [...]

In Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior , physicist Leonard Mlodinow, coauthor of The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, gives us a startling and eye-opening examination of how the unconscious mind shapes our experience of the world. Employing his trademark wit and lucid, accessible explanations of the most obscure scientific subjects, Mlodinow unravels the complexities of the subliminal [...]

Bryan Sykes, renowned geneticist and bestselling author of The Seven Daughters of Eve, turns his sights on the United States, one of the most genetically variegated countries in the world. From the blue-blooded pockets of old-WASP New England to the vast tribal lands of the Navajo, Bryan Sykes takes the reader on a genetic tour of [...]

What makes us human? This evening, two scientists present new work that tackles this question from very different angles. In Masters of the Planet: The Search for Our Human Origins, noted paleoanthropologist Ian Tattersalldiscusses new research that sheds light on just what happened 100,000 years ago that vaulted our species forward and made us the indisputable masters [...]