This Will Make You Smarter

But increasingly published negative results (which include experiments that succeed in showing no effects) are becoming another essential tool in the scientific method.

The challenge for a distributed system is to achieve this illusion of a single unified behavior in the face of so much underlying complexity.

Humans, and essentially all the animals you know and love, typically harness a couple thousand kilojoules per mole by burning food with oxygen.

Kevin Kelly’s quantified self and Gary Wolf’s data-driven life. With its mobile sensors and apps

Doctors have generally caved in their quest to define root cause, and they are fairly representative of most of us. Ironically, this is happening at a time when there is unprecedented capability for finding the explanation. But we’re just too busy. So to tweak our cognitive performance

Having been fed personal data provided by users themselves or gathered by third parties, the technology would then analyze it to “enable identification of opportunities and/or provisioning of recommendations to increase user productivity and/or improve quality of life.”

The chances of success may hinge on our understanding of the possible diversity of the chemical basis of life itself: “otherness” not among DNA-encoded species but among life-forms using different molecules to encode traits.

indicate that your physical self possesses about 10 trillion human cells and about 100 trillion bacterial cells.

Our internal metabolisms are intimately interwoven with this Earthly metabolism; one result is the replacement of every atom in our bodies every seven years or so.