When I turned on my computer the other day, a notification greeted me to update my software. I clicked " okay " and marveled at the computer's capacity to improve itself. An hour or so later, my computer had improved its programs to run faster, cleaned up its layout to appear more modern, and deleted several useless programs. On many occasions, the brain has been compared to a computer in its v...

One hundred years after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City that caused the death of 146 garment workers, a garment fire on November 24, 2012 in Bangladesh resulted in 111 deaths under remarkably similar circumstances. The majority of these workers were also young women, economically disadvantaged, migrants, and, by any definition, vulnerable. Fires have been a persistent prob...

Mind that Found Itself. By Clifford Whittingham Beers. New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1908. Pp. 362. "A Mind that Found Itself" is a wonderfully graphic account of the wandering of a mind set adrift, recorded by that mind after it had once more found its moorings. The author describes, as only one who has experienced them can describe, the vividly realistic hallucinations and terri...

The question of first-cause has troubled philosophers and cosmologists alike. Now that it is apparent that our universe began in a Big Bang explosion, the question of what happened before the Big Bang arises. Inflation seems like a very promising answer, but as Borde and Vilenkin have shown, the inflationary state preceding the Big Bang could not have been infinite in duration — it must have ha...