It is perhaps surprising, given the contemporary eminence of neuroscience within biological research, that it was not appreciated until the 17th century that the brain might have an important function. A compelling new book by Carl Zimmer surveys the scientific, conceptual and political upheavals in England at this time as a backdrop to the major experimental work carried out by a little-known ...

We consider aspects of nonequilibrium statistical mechanics that have traditionally not been considered in irreversible thermodynamics. More specifically we refer to the frenetic contribution in fluctuation and response theory, which complements the entropic component. Frenesy then refers to an amount of volatility or of dynamical activity defined on trajectories in some reduced description. It...

Meno: I admit the cogency of your argument, and therefore, Socrates, I wonder that knowledge should be preferred to right opinion-or why they should ever differ. Socrates: And shall I explain this wonder to you? Meno: Do tell me. Socrates: You would not wonder if you had ever observed the images of Daedalus; but perhaps you have not got them in your country? Meno: What have they to do with the ...

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine is an imposing monument to the wealth and power of scientific medicine. Set on its own block in upper Manhattan, its rhetorical centre is the Stern Auditorium. Here, just over a year after 9/11, a group of gurus and self-seekers assembled to confer on the nature of the self. I was there too, looking for help in constructing a grand unified theory of soul and b...