Last week I gave a lecture at a corporative event for some 200 executives in the insurance business. Although this happened abroad, my experience is that things would not have been very different here. My mission was to jump-start some macro-level reflection, gently pushing people out of their comfort zone, posing questions that, in the rush of everyday life, we tend to leave aside.

As I was asked to speak about our place in the Universe, I embarked on an exploration of how modern science sees the perennial questions of our existence: our origin, the search for meaning, our role as a thinking species, our future.

I started by mentioning how we are creatures bound by time, with a history that begins and ends. I argued that, just the same, stars and the Universe have their own histories, with a beginning and an end. The passage of time and our awareness of it is, perhaps, our most defining trait: knowing that we exist and that this existence has an end. (At this point, the folks from the life-insurance sector smiled.)

I also argued that much of the human creative effort, our poems and symphonies, our literature, the sciences and philosophical ideas, the sum total of our cultural output, can be seen as a response to the unease of being aware creatures, an attempt to have some measure of control and grace in face of the inexorable. Love, sex, power, relationships, are the road signs of our path ahead, leading this way or that according to our choices.

I then moved to the question of origins: of the Universe, of stars, of life, arguing that every culture that we are aware of, from the oldest to the most current, have offered a narrative of Creation, an attempt to understand where everything came from.

To stare at the night sky, far from city lights, and see hundreds, even thousands, of stars compels us to ask whether other creatures live out there, and how similar or different they are from us. Could there be another kind of intelligence in the cosmos? What kind of intelligence would that be? Individual? Collective? Machine-like? Something unexpected and new?

The case for extraterrestrial life becomes even more compelling when we learn that there are some 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone, the sun being but one of them. And now that we know that most stars do have planets around them, and that many of these probably will have moons, we arrive at the staggering figure of trillions of worlds besides ours in our galaxy alone, each unique, each with its own history and possibilities.

I showed breathtaking images from the Hubble Space Telescope and other space telescopes, of lunar modules and Mars rovers, explaining that these machines are our wonderful creations, small robots travelling for millions of miles across space, visiting and taking images of other worlds while being controlled from Earth by scientists and engineers. I suggested that we should celebrate such technological marvels as we celebrate other great works of human ingenuity such as the pyramids and medieval cathedrals, the architecture of Brasília and Barcelona, the Mona Lisa and Mahler's symphonies.

I argued that contrary to what most think, and as I explain in my book Tear at the Edge of Creation, the more we learn about the Universe the more relevant we become, molecular machines capable of seeing far beyond our limited perception of reality.

I tried, with words and images, to celebrate the human condition and the austere beauty of the Universe, both capable of amazing feats of creation and destruction. I argued that the tragic and the sublime are, like the two-faced Janus, two inseparable aspects of existence, part of the same whole. I argued that we matter because we are unique, that we can be special creatures without being specially created. I argued that our cosmic loneliness should not scare us but instill us to action, working as a unifying force in times of division.

At the end of all this, as inexorable as the passage of time, came the inevitable question, betraying our most ancient fears: "Sir, do you believe in God?"

You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

We all know how the battle lines shake out: evangelical vs. scientist, believer vs. atheist. The culture war defined as science vs. religion is so overheated that it seems to be more of a caricature than a coherent, useful discussion. Unless, that is, someone is trying to stretch beyond the usual polarities.

Ronald Dworkin, an acclaimed American legal scholar who died in February at the age of 82, has done just that in Religion Without God. After reading an excerpt in The New York Review of Books, I couldn't help but think that Dworkin offers a way into discussions of science and human spiritual endeavor that is actually engaging and interesting, not combative and dogmatic.

Here's how he frames it:

The familiar stark divide between people of religion and without religion is too crude. Many millions of people who count themselves atheists have convictions and experiences very like and just as profound as those that believers count as religious.

How does a culture saturated with the fruits (and poisons) of science understand the ancient human longing that is sometimes called religious, sometimes spiritual or sometimes sacred? The route of absolute rejection (taken famously by Richard Dawkins) makes for a clean ideology. But it comes at a cost: ignoring the reality of human experience. This is why Dworkin is keen to show that — even for people who call themselves atheist — there remains a sense or a value to the world which bears so much in common with attitudes we call religious or spiritual. In his mind, to not see them as such is a kind of willful blindness:

[These atheists] find the Grand Canyon not just arresting but breathtakingly and eerily wonderful. They are not simply interested in the latest discoveries about the vast universe but enthralled by them. These are not, for them, just a matter of immediate sensuous and otherwise inexplicable response. They express a conviction that the force and wonder they sense are real, just as real as planets or pain, that moral truth and natural wonder do not simply evoke awe but call for it.

Given the force of these responses to experience, Dworkin wants to know if there can be an understanding of religiousness that does not involve God. Dworkin understands, of course, that there are religions such as Buddhism that do not involve a creator deity. But he goes far beyond that fact. What Dworkin pursues is insight into the core of what makes us human and how it might be grounded in something other than an idea of God:

Religion, we should say, does not necessarily mean a belief in God. But then, granted that someone can be religious without believing in a god, what does being religious mean? What is the difference between a religious attitude toward the world and a nonreligious attitude?

I have never been a big fan of the word religion in these debates, given its implications of institutional power and politics. But if we understand it as a response to experience, in the way that William James did, then Dworkin is, I believe, on to something. His question is an important one which people of good will on both sides of the science and religion discussion (as opposed to the science vs. religion debate) need to address.

While Dworkin's specific answer hinges on ideas about value and its attribution, there will be other ways, I am sure, to respond to the question.

And it's the question which matters most. We live in an era when attitudes about religion are changing in the very same moment that the institutions of science are being challenged by forces of religious extremism. For people not given to extremes, this is the moment to get creative.

You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @AdamFrank4

It's the end of the semester here at UC Berkeley, and I've got testing on my mind. I'm not the only one; across campus, instructors are engaged in the arduous task of grading quickly and fairly while students sigh with relief as they exit their final, final exams.

We most often think of tests as being about assessment. They tell us something about how successfully an individual has mastered the material being tested, and this assessment can in turn help us to assign grades, make determinations about placement or identify areas that would benefit from further study.

There's no doubt that these uses for tests have some value. But thinking of tests as mere instruments for assessment misses an opportunity for learning.

The very process of preparing for and taking tests can foster learning, and that, after all, is the fundamental goal of education, isn't it? I'd certainly like to think so, though there are more cynical takes on the role of higher education.

Let's consider a thought-provoking article published last month in which UCLA ecologist Peter Nonacs describes how he boosted learning in his behavioral ecology class by letting students cheat on a test. (Okay, so it wasn't really cheating, since he sanctioned the use of peers, books, the Internet and other sources in crafting the best answers to the exam questions.) As he'd hoped, the lead-up to the exam and the test-taking itself got students thinking like behavioral ecologists, including the very principles of game theory Nonacs hoped to instill:

In discussion section, they speculated, organized, and plotted. What would be the test's payoff matrix? Would cooperation be rewarded or counter-productive? Would a large group work better, or smaller subgroups with specified tasks? What about "scroungers" who didn't study but were planning to parasitize everyone else's hard work? How much reciprocity would be demanded in order to share benefits?

His approach was especially clever and appropriate for a class on ecology, where cooperation and competition in real-world "tests" are integral to the subject matter, but the strategy of rethinking tests as opportunities for learning is more general. Nonacs writes:

Is the take-home message, then, that cheating is good? Well ... no. Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren't in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from "Get a higher grade than my classmates" to "Get to the best answer."

A shift to thinking about tests for mastery rather than measurement isn't just refreshing, it's also supported by psychological research.

Dozens (if not hundreds) of studies have investigated students' goals in learning and how they influence achievement. Most prominently, researchers have differentiated mastery goals, which focus on improving one's own competence, from performance goals, which focus on doing well to outperform others, obtain positive feedback (in the form of grades or praise), or avoid looking bad.

Adopting mastery goals pretty reliably leads to greater learning, increases willingness to tackle hard problems and can even improve social relationships. So conceptualizing tests as opportunities for learning – consistent with a mastery goal – can itself improve learning, even if the tests take more traditional forms than that of Nonacs's collaborative experiment.

And that's not all: there's also evidence that test-taking itself can improve retention for the material being tested. In a 2006 demonstration of a phenomenon known as the "testing effect," for example, Roedieger and Karpicke had students read passages of text and then either repeatedly study them or repeatedly test their ability to recall them, without any feedback on how well they did on the tests. The students who repeatedly studied the passage were more confident about their ability to remember the content than those who were repeatedly tested. But the latter group considerably outperformed the former when it came to actual memory for the passage one week later.

So testing can be an excellent tool in an educator's toolbox, but it's one that needs to be used wisely. The American Psychological Association warns of the dangers of "high-stakes" testing in our nation's schools, and a report from the National Academies of Science suggests few benefits to our current test-based accountability system.

Part of the problem, I contend, is a narrow focus on testing for assessment. Let's start thinking about testing for learning.

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

At my son's music recital last week, the 4th-graders performed a hand-clapping, footstomping version of Queen's "We will rock you."

It was marvelous, but very odd, to hear these children sing out the words:

Buddy you're a boy make a big noise

Playin' in the street gonna be a big man some day

You got mud on yo' face

You big disgrace

Kickin' your can all over the place

They followed it up with a rendition of Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams," with its disturbing and emotional lyrics:

I walk this empty street

On the Boulevard of broken dreams

When the city sleeps

And I'm the only one and I walk alone

I walk alone

I walk alone

I walk alone

I thought of this when I watched Chris Hadfield's self-produced cover of David Bowie's 1969 masterpiece "Space Oddity." What made this different from the innumerable vanity projects that find their way onto YouTube is the fact that Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut and he recorded his version from the International Space Station.

Commander Hadfield, who sports a truly impressive Marlboro Man mustache, sings his heart out from an actual tin can floating far above world, which we see behind him out the window. Understandably, he changes the lyrics. Bowie's Major Tom won't make it home; he's lost in space; he loses Ground Control; that's where the song's magic happens. But we feel the original lyrics even as Hadfield sings his happier version.

Commander Hadfield's cover, like the kids' versions of Queen and Green Day, belongs to a recognizable genre of songs that start out as one thing — outsider songs, songs of rebellion and alienation — but end up in a very different cultural location.

Compare Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA," which is an angry song reflecting despair at the economic and social hardships of post-Vietnam America, but that has wound up, in the cultural imagination, as a sort of patriotic rallying-cry.

Readers, what are some other songs that have changed their meaning in this way?

You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

Eight days from now, I'll meet my robot surgeon for the first time. His name is da Vinci, and he'll be at work inside my body for about 4.5 hours. I can't wait.

On May 6, I was diagnosed with a rare form of endometrial cancer. The biopsy result came as a shock, because I have only a few mild symptoms, and they only began last month.

The aftershock was a big one too: the type I have, serous carcinoma, is rare, representing only 5 percent of all endometrial cancers; it can at times be quite badly behaved because it may (or may not) spread beyond the uterus even when caught early.

So I'm ready for da Vinci to do his thing — in this case a radical hysterectomy — so that I can get started on recovery.

Of course, I understand that the more scientifically accurate term for me to use is "robot-assisted surgery," because the da Vinci robot is only as proficient as the person controlling his movements.

A week ago today, I met that person, the human half of my oncological-surgery team. Dr. William Irvin of Riverside Regional Medical Center in Newport News, Virginia, told me what I need to know, and what we need to do going forward, in a clear and unrushed manner, even while acknowledging that my world (and my family's) had just abruptly tilted.

I left his office feeling way better than I had felt when walking in, even after hearing some formidable details of what's ahead over the next few months, including chemotherapy.

But, with apologies to Dr. Irvin, it's da Vinci's name I've written on my calendar for May 24th.

Yes, I'm aware that there are questions and some outright skepticism about both the benefits and the cost of this robotic surgery. In fact, NPR covered this topic a few weeks ago. But I'm blogging here from a personal perspective, not reporting about a medical technique.

Given my particular health history and current diagnosis, and based on the reading I have done and my consultation with my oncologist, I believe that da Vinci is likely to bring some genuine benefits to my situation. Not only will the surgical incisions be small (minimally invasive), easing my recovery significantly, during the procedure, as this ABC News video shows, the robot's dexterous mobility and 3D visualization will offer heightened precision. Dr. Irvin has called da Vinci "a quantum leap" forward in treating gynecological malignancies, and that sounds good to me.

What da Vinci can't do — what no human or machine can do — is predict my long-term prognosis. A stage I cancer — the "best" of the possible stages because the cancer cells are highly localized — could very well be the explanation for my mild symptoms. But that's only a hope. We won't know the cancer's stage until after the surgical exploration and the report from the pathology lab.

As we cancer patients know too well, we can't will ourselves into a certain stage.

What we can do is take good care of our bodies and our spirits, find an excellent oncologist and follow his or her advice and instructions, and surround ourselves with positive people (and animals!). I'm doing each of those things.

I find myself thinking of how many others of you (or your loved ones) are also grappling with serious health challenges, and wanting to send a shout-out to each of you.

I am hyper-aware, too, that high-end medical resources like da Vinci are available in terribly unequal fashion around the world (and in this country as well). This is a sobering fact, one that I won't forget going forward.

Returning to my own circumstance, all things considered, as we say at NPR, I'm feeling steadier about the coming challenges than I would have anticipated.

I'm ready to get this done, and I know da Vinci is too.

Barbara's new book, How Animals Grieve, has just been published. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking daily on Twitter: @bjkingape

People often ask me how I got interested in science. I wish I could answer that I had a mentor when I was a child, that a biologist or a physicist visited my school when I was in third grade and transformed my life. But that's not what happened to me and, sadly, not what happens to the vast majority of children.

There are, of course, exceptions, but the fact is that STEM professionals (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) rarely visit schools, public or private, to speak about what they do and why they do it. The majority don't even volunteer to speak at their own children's schools, something I find absurd.

My own interest in science was a happy accident, something that came from inside, a sort of innate urgency to find out how the world works and how we can better relate to Nature.

I had the good fortune to spend summers at my grandparents' house in the mountains not far from Rio de Janeiro. It was a lush and dramatic setting, with highly eroded peaks covered in tufts of tropical forest. Darwin — during his voyage on the HMS Beagle — was enchanted by similar terrain. I recall asking my father, a dentist, how could rock — being so hard — become so sculpted.

"Time does it, a time so vast that it would be like a swallow taking a sip every day to empty a whole ocean," he once said.

I collected rocks and insects in those mountains. I hunted bats (the vampire kind!), fished, hiked, ran away from poisonous snakes, went up countless trees and explored thick jungles with a machete in hand. My exposure to Nature was direct; it was part of my childhood.

Only later, when I started science classes in school, did I begin to understand that there was a method perfectly suited to studying the world and its creatures, a method that could become a career, a way of life.

At 13 I knew I would do something related to science or engineering. And this without ever talking to, or even seeing, a single scientist! My inspiration, as with the vast majority of children everywhere, came from books, TV shows and family. Ask yourself: what percentage of children under 13 have ever seen or listened to a scientist in person? I don't have a number, but I imagine it is appallingly small.

I think this has to change, that every school, public or private, should have a program bringing in STEM professionals once or twice a year to talk about their research and their professional lives. How does a mathematician make a living? What does a biologist do? These visits should include graduate students, from astronomy to zoology.

Granting agencies, such as the National Science Foundation and NASA are now requiring some sort of outreach as part of their funding packages, which is great. Still, there should be a much stronger partnership between schools, universities, research centers and industry to increase the exposure of young students to a life in the sciences.

Picture 20 fourth graders watching a visual presentation that captures the stunning world of particle accelerators! How about the importance of chemistry in our everyday lives, or the budding reality of robotics, how to build satellites, detect black holes and exoplanets or decode a genome? Face-to-face encounters help drive home the fact that science pretty much defines the world in which we live.

I often go to schools in the United States and Brazil, speaking with students of all ages. I see their eyes brighten when I talk about how huge the universe is, how there is a giant black hole in the middle of the Milky Way, the prospects for life beyond Earth and why the Higgs boson interesting. Even teenagers make an effort to listen, their curiosity piqued by the possibility of a future that sometimes sounds impossible.

In a recent meeting of the American Physical Society, where I serve as a general councillor, we discussed a report on the need for better-prepared high school teachers. The number of universities preparing science teachers across the country needs to grow significantly. Regional centers in physics and science education should be created as part of an overall effort to promote a sharp improvement in pedagogy. In short, there are pressing needs in both number and quality when it comes to teaching science in the U.S.

But let's not overlook a very simple step that we can take right now, without delay: scientists, engineers and mathematicians can volunteer to share their professional experiences with schools in their neighborhoods. A couple of visits a year — a few hours of time — could inspire thousands to pursue a life in the sciences and impact our collective future.

You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

Spade's arms went around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging through his blue sleeves.

That line comes from The Maltese Falcon and the guy with the blue sleeves is none other than Sam Spade. I read those words in a worn paperback copy my dad loaned me when I was 18 and I was quickly hooked. I'd fallen in love with the dark world of the noir detective. But who hasn't?

What is it about these world-weary detectives that makes their stories so compelling that they can be told over and over again? More to the point, what makes noir so perfect for narratives of the future? Why are there so many detectives spread out across space and time?

The hard-boiled detective genre is remarkably flexible. It's been cast in a suburban high school (the remarkable Brick), it's been a done as literary comedy (Bored to Death) and it's been done a post-modem meta-fiction (Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy). All you need are the genre's fundamental elements: a dark city that knows how to keep its secrets; a dangerous woman with a past; rich kids caught up in the underworld and the powerful family that wants them back. At the center of it all is the detective.

He (it is usually a he) is a man intimate with loss, carrying the weight of a backstory we may never fully see. But that past is what lets him move so easily from one side of the law to the other, all the while guided by a moral compass of his own making. Through double-crosses too numerous to count (noir is renown for its inscrutable plots) and seduction to steamy to recount here, the detective prevails (or doesn't).

We have seen it a thousand times and never, ever seem to tire of it. Then the detective shows up in our visions of the future and we see it all again with fresh eyes.

The two most important appearances of future noir occurred at almost the same time. The first was Blade Runner and its hero Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), a cop working in a bleak, over-crowded, decaying Los Angeles where the rain never lets up. Deckard's job — running down replicants (artificial humans) — takes an unexpected turn into the dark heights of corporate power and the arms of a woman he should know better than to fall for.

The second critical piece of future-noir was the epoch-making Neuromancer in which William Gibson helped set the stage for our collective imaginings of cyberspace. Neuromancer's protagonist Case is not strictly a detective. He is a damaged but brilliant hacker. His own quest for truth and redemption takes him through many noir-genre staples, including confrontation with a family of stratospheric wealth and power (they actually live in orbit).

Neuromancer and Blade Runner served as ambassadors to a new kind of future — the dystopian world of cyberpunk. Gone were the gleaming silver starships of Star Trek's final frontier. Cyberpunk represented the earliest recognition that the digital future we were building might be something other than a free-flowing utopia.

It's a future full of giant, data-rich corporations running the world for their own benefit. It's a future full of cyber-ghettos, where people living at the margins serve the needs of their corporate overlords. It's a place where you don't want to find yourself on the wrong side of the line between power and powerlessness. It's a world where power is held by those who control information. It's, in short, the world the noir detective has always inhabited.

The years since Neuromancer and Blade Runner have been full of fiction that fit the noir mold. There was the fantastic novel Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan. In film, I Robot kept the form but lacked the deeper vision. More recently we saw Looper and Surrogates (both with Bruce Willis, if that says anything).

So what are we to make of the detectives of the future? It may be that they tell us something useful about the future. Their darkness may reflect a new understanding of progress and its price.

Or it could be that it's just all about the form. That is because nothing, absolutely nothing, beats a story about a guy, a gun, a mystery he can't shake and a city that knows how to keep its secrets.

You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @AdamFrank4

Last week Eugenie C. Scott announced that she plans to retire from her role as executive director of the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), an Oakland-based not-for-profit that supports education concerning evolution and climate science, especially in public schools. Scott has been a major figure in debates about evolution and creationism. She moved the NCSE decisively into climate science with the 2012 launch of a major initiative to "defend and support the teaching of climate change."

Here's a short video in which Scott explains some parallels between the rejection of evolution and the rejection of climate science:

Thanks for everything you've done, Eugenie!

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

Dear reader,

Mother's Day is upon us and I'm here to share some news with you. While there's nothing wrong with a well-chosen gift, recent research in psychology suggests your time might be better spent writing a well-crafted card to mom.

A study by Toepfer, Cichy and Peters, published last year in the Journal of Happiness Studies, found that writing letters of gratitude increased the letter-writer's life satisfaction and happiness. Doing so also decreased symptoms associated with depression.

The researchers recruited 219 adults to participate in the study. Over the course of four weeks, people in the experimental group wrote three letters of gratitude expressing their appreciation for one or more individuals. Participants were asked "to be reflective, write expressively, and compose letters from a positive orientation while avoiding 'thank you notes' for material gifts." The letters were mailed to their intended recipients at the conclusion of the study.

Participants in a control group were not instructed to write letters, but — along with those in the experimental group — completed tests assessing their life satisfaction, happiness and depressive symptoms at the start and end of the four-week period.

The researchers found positive pre- to post-test changes for participants who wrote letters, but not for those in the control group. Specifically, the letter-writers fared better on measures of life satisfaction (e.g., agreeing with "I am satisfied with life"), happiness (e.g., more likely to select "Compared to most of my peers, I consider myself a very happy person") and depression (e.g., less likely to indicate that in the past week, "I was bothered by things that usually don't bother me").

You knew your mother was right (they always are!) all those years ago when she taught you the value of good manners. Now science confirms it! So, it's time to put pen to paper for a heartfelt letter of gratitude and appreciation. It'll do you both some good.

With heartfelt thanks to my own wonderful mother,

Tania

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

There are two excellent ideas at the heart of art historian Benjamin Binstock's beautiful and strange new book Vermeer's Family Secrets. The first is taken from a Nietzsche quote:

"We have learned to love all things that we now love."

The second is that you can't recognize a painting for what it is just by looking at it. Getting to know, and so coming to love, a work of art, or the work of an artist, is itself hard work. Binstock compares it to bringing a distant planet into focus. It takes a lot of knowledge, and a great deal of careful attention to what others (scientists, historians, critics) have learned and thought, to be able to see what is out there.

Now, imagine a family: the father is a painter. The mother, the children and the maid are his models. The father works at home. The art changes and develops as his models grow up and the relationships among them evolve. In time, one of his models, a child, takes up the brush and becomes the father's assistant and then his apprentice.

The apprentice is confined, literally and figuratively, to the materials of the father — the same interior scenes, the same pigments, the same bolts of canvass. The apprentice seeks to imitate the master. But the master is also influenced, or even inspired, by the work of the pupil, just as both of them share models because, after all, they share a single studio, home and family.

This, Binstock claims, is exactly the situation in the Vermeer household.

Scholars have long found it difficult to come up with a coherent story of Vermeer's development, or even of the order in which the very small number of extant paintings (some 30 odd) were made. Some of the paintings just don't fit. They depict the same cast of characters, occupying the same rooms and wearing the same clothes. They're made out of the same paints, using the same basic materials and techniques. But they look different. They lack the technical facility and compositional understanding of the others, even as they are also, sometimes, free-spirited and vigorous — worth loving! — in a way that is not typical of Vermeer.

Binstock is not alone in noticing that a good sixth of Vermeer's pictures don't seem to fit. He may be alone in advancing an account that explains not only their differences, but also their similarities. He says that, contrary to what has been widely supposed, Vermeer did have an apprentice: his daughter Maria (of pearl earring fame). Binstock also offers plausible explanations of why it has taken until now for us to realize this.

First, in the Delft of Vermeer's day, there was no requirement that children be registered as apprentices. Second, girls and women were not encouraged and Maria would have been expected, or perhaps required, to give up painting at marriage. Hence there is no sequel to her work in her father's studio. Finally, Vermeer's family paid the bills with the money from his paintings. Indeed, they traded paintings for food. Vermeer's widow may have deliberately passed off Maria's works as by the master himself in order to pay off debts.

In this view, Maria, and to some degree Vermeer himself, were complicit in this. It was in everyone's interest to keep Maria's apprenticeship a secret. (As it was in their interest to keep other things secret, such as the family's illegal adherence to Catholicism.)

Contemporary scholars scoff at approaches to art that lean too heavily on cults of personality or biographical detail. After all, when work is good, it stands on its own and doesn't require a romantic backstory. Quite right. But Binstock makes the case that, where Vermeer is concerned, the family isn't backstory. Vermeer painted his family. And his family painted right back.

Nor can Binstock be accused of making excuses for Vermeer, as if explaining away his bad paintings. Maria's paintings — if that is what they are — are very good. They are genuine artistic responses to the work of her father and, Binstock shows, they compelled her father to respond to them as works of art in turn, actively influencing his choices and development. She never equalled her father. But then her apprenticeship was very brief. It is truly extraordinary what she accomplished in a small number of years.

If Binstock is right, then seven paintings widely taken to be painted by Johannes Vermeer — and that fetch prices at auction in the millions of dollars — are not by his hand at all.

Which is of course not to say that these paintings are not Vermeers. They are by a Vermeer, after all: Maria Vermeer.

The important and conceptually intriguing question raised by Binstock's book — and, if he is right, raised by Vermeer's oeuvre itself — is this:

What is it to be a Vermeer, anyway?

With millions of dollars potentially hanging in the balance, it will be very interesting to see how art history, as a field, responds to Binstock's challenge.

The New York Humanities Institute is sponsoring a free, day-long symposium on Binstock's book — Vermeer's Daughter? — on Saturday, May 18, in Manhattan. Binstock will make his case. A very impressive cast of writers and artists will respond.

You can keep up with more of what Alva Noë is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @alvanoe

When was the last time you met someone who didn't tell you they were "crazy busy"? It seems like everyone these days is overwhelmed. From the endless tasks of maintaining home and family life to the ever-accelerating pressures of the endlessly troubled, endlessly competitive economy, it seems that all of us are running ragged.

In this permanent state of hyperventilation, the issue for us all is not stopping to smell roses. It's not even noticing that there are roses right there in front of us. Joseph Campbell, the great scholar of religion, hit the core of our problem when he wrote, "People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive."

But how can we experience "being alive" in the midst of the crushing urgencies that make up modern life?

Well, it might seem strange, but one answer to that question is "science," at least science with a lowercase "s." Science, you see, is all about noticing. This is where it begins, with simple act of catching seeing the smallest detail as an opening to a wider world of wonder and awe. And here is the good news. You don't need a particle accelerator or well-equipped genetics lab in your basement to practice noticing (that would be science with a capital "S").

You already are a scientist. You have been since you were a kid playing with water in the tub, or screwing around in the backyard with dirt and sticks and stuff.

If you want to rebuild your inner-scientist-noticing-skills, the best place to begin is with a walk in the woods.

There are lots of reasons to take a walk in the woods. To get away from it all, clear your head, smell the fresh air. The problem, of course, is that even if we get ourselves into a park or a forest, we might still be so lost in our heads that we miss what's right in front of us. Practicing noticing, like a scientist, can change that by binding us to experience in ways that are thrilling, even in their ordinariness.

Noticing can take many forms. One trick is to count things. Scientists love to count stuff. How many trees are there on the sides of a steep hill compared with its crest? How many leaves are there on the stalks of the blue flowers compared to the yellow ones? How many different kinds of birdsong do you hear when you stop and listen, (by the way, this requires really stopping and really listening, which is awesome). Counting things forces you to pay attention to subtleties in the landscape, the plants, the critters.

Other things scientists love: shapes, colors, patterns. Do the rocks at the stream's edge look different from the ones near the trail? Do the big cattails have the same color as the small ones? Get your naturalist on and bring a notebook. Pretend you are Henry David Thoreau or John Muir. Jot down your findings, make little drawings and always, always ask your yourself those basic questions: why, how, when?

You don't need the answers. As the poet Rilke once said, "Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language." Questions raise our pulse and sharpen our delight.

Noticing need not be a passive activity. Remember the words of the great scientist Ms. Frizzle (of The Magic School Bus), "Take changes, make mistakes, get messy." Who needs a gym when you can climb the steep face of a hill? Hoisting yourself up a tree is a great way to notice the trees, the branches and the roots. Sure, most of us won't be emulating John Muir, riding out a Yosemite thunderstorm in the crest of wildly swaying Douglas fir. Still, we might climb a few low-hanging branches, forcing ourselves into questions like: "Why do the big limbs give way to narrow branches?" or "Exactly where on the branch do the leaves start to grow?" and, of course, "How the hell do I get down from here?"

I am not a biologist, geologist or plant physiologist, so I am as clueless as the next guy when I get out in the woods. But these science tricks for noticing help me focus my attention and keep me present. And that's what it's all about: presence.

Refining our capacity to notice is an act of reverence that we can bring to everywhere and everywhen. It's an invitation, bringing the world's most basic presence into view, opening our horizons and restoring our spirits. And that is what science is really there for.

You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @AdamFrank4

Sexual thrill-seeker. Sex-mad flatmate.

These phrases, as reported by ABC News's Diane Sawyer, have been used by the media to describe Amanda Knox, the American study abroad student who, while living in Perugia, Italy, in 2007, was charged with murder. Specifically, she was charged with killing her female roommate, who was found in their apartment in a state of partial undress with her throat slit. After four years in prison, Knox's conviction was overturned. She is now back in the United States (although the acquittal itself was overturned last month, and Italy wants her to return for a retrial.)

Obviously, I have no idea whether the prosecutor's argument against Knox, including the charge that the murder resulted from sex games gone awry, has a shred of truth to it. Here's what I do know: If Amanda Knox had been Andrew Knox, the breathless and prolonged excitement around his sex life would be greatly diminished, or absent altogether. If Amanda had been Andrew, he wouldn't have been labeled "a sex-mad flatmate" in the media.

No, just as Frank Bruni writes in last Sunday's New York Times, the "veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming" heaped on Amanda Knox amounts to sexism run rampant.

While he finds the case constructed against Amanda Knox to be "profoundly flawed", it's the sexism Bruni focuses on. As he puts it: "For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it's a noose."

Now, some of you who have read excerpts of Knox's new memoir (as I have), or the whole thing (as I haven't), might point out that she doesn't shy away from the sexed-up details, invoking her one-night stands and her now famous bunny shaped vibrator. So isn't she just asking for the discourse to ignite around her sexuality?

We should, of course, hear the terrible echoes of rape culture in this "she's asking for it" question, and answer it firmly with a no. Just as wearing skimpy clothes, flirting or drinking isn't asking for rape, casual consensual sex isn't a predictor of violence. Writing about casual consensual sex shouldn't set one up for sex-shaming, either.

I can't help but connect the popular discourse about Amanda Knox with the academic discourse I teach about in my Evolutionary Perspectives of Gender course. The framework is different, but the underlying principle is the same.

In that class, the students and I scrutinize anthropological and archaeological models of gender roles in prehistory. More often than not, the men in the models are the strivers and achievers, responsible for cultural innovation and our lineage's reproductive success. Women are comparatively passive, stay-at-home types. They're baby-focused, too.

Good exceptions to this gender stereotyping in models of prehistory do exist, exemplified by the work of Adrienne Zihlman. Still, the consistency of gender bias is astonishing, ranging from the scenario of man the hunter to the model of woman the cooker.

In the cooking version, the women are not as passive in terms of survival behaviors as in the hunting version. Yet, as cooks, they nevertheless become victims of men who steal the products (cooked tubers) of their labor; they end up in need of protection by males from males.

In other words, in the dominant scenarios of how we became human, men trip a wire of evolutionary success, women are caught in a noose of neediness.

These imagined fundamental differences between the sexes must seem natural to many, natural enough that they become inscribed in the stories we tell ourselves about our present lives. This includes the stories we tell about men's and women's sexual lives.

The key question is: When will we as a society evolve beyond the telling of these sexist stories, about Amanda Knox and countless others?

Barbara's new book, How Animals Grieve, has just been published. You can keep up with more of what she is thinking daily on Twitter: @bjkingape

When I was starting my PhD studies at King's College London, I had the opportunity to meet the famous physicist John Bell. His work established that quantum mechanics — and the bizarre kind of reality it entails — happens to be the way the world is. My conversation with Bell says a lot about how the physics community at large deals with the strange predictions from quantum mechanics. It's mostly with a combination of forced indifference and fear.

Things have changed surprisingly little in the intervening three decades, even if nowadays a growing number of scientists and philosophers grapple with what Einstein called "spooky action-at-a-distance."

In my second year, after passing the dreaded qualifying exam, I had to pin down my research topic. My advisor, John G. Taylor, was interested in unified theories using supersymmetry. This was the latest fashion in the early 80s, after Michael Green, now at Cambridge University, and John Schwartz, from Caltech, had shown that string theory, when married to supersymmetry (the origin of the famous "superstrings" that we hear so much about nowadays), offered renewed hope for a "theory of everything."

The idea was to explore how effectively string models describing the four fundamental forces in 9 and 10 spatial dimensions could be reduced to the usual three dimensions in which we live. The topic was fun, but not exactly what I was looking for. I wanted to do something else. (I ended up doing cosmology in higher dimensional spaces, which was a lot of fun!)

When I found out that John Bell was speaking at a conference at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) near Oxford, I rushed to catch a train and meet him. Bell was then working at CERN, the lab where the Higgs boson was found last year. Despite his excellent work in accelerator physics, Bell was famous for another reason, a theorem that had revolutionized our understanding of quantum physics.

In a nutshell, his theorem said something like this: our naïve expectation of "locality," that every effect has a local cause, independent of what happens elsewhere, is wrong. Two or more particles — and even larger objects — can coexist in states where one affects the other without an exchange of information or a cause.

It is as if twin sisters went to two parties in different countries and their actions were connected. If one sister danced the twist, the other would invariably tango, and vice versa. The sisters would always seem to "know" what to do, even without communicating. It would be as if they were a single unit, not two different people.

Particles in this kind of state are called "entangled." What Bell found was that, for entangled states, the whole is not just larger than the parts; the parts don't even make sense! And the "connection" is independent of the distance between the two particles. Accidentally, quantum physics has discovered some kind of wholeness in Nature.

Starting with my earliest days as a physics undergraduate in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I've been fascinated by quantum mechanics. Why were Einstein and Bohr, two of the great giants of twentieth-century physics, so much at odds with what it meant? I wondered if I should switch research topics and work on this question.

In his talk at RAL, Bell spoke about his 1964 theorem and how recent experiments by John Clauser in the United States and Alain Aspect in France had confirmed that quantum mechanics violated the assumption of locality. Einstein's spooky action-at-a-distance was a ghost that, as I wrote here last week, seemed to be real. The weird thing was that the "influence" between the two particles seemed to act instantaneously; or, at least, faster than the speed of light.

"Dr. Bell, my name is Marcelo Gleiser and I'm working with John Taylor on supersymmetric theories."

"Good, excellent topic of research."

"Yes, but the fact is, I've been interested in the foundations of quantum physics since I was an undergraduate. I even wrote to David Bohm asking if he would like to supervise my thesis work. But he said he wasn't taking students any more." (Bohm was then at nearby Birkbeck College, also in London.) Bell's eyes twinkled ever so slightly when I mentioned Bohm.

"Well, I find your interests laudable and rare for someone your age. However, I strongly advise you not to do your thesis work on such topics."

"And why not?" I asked, already guessing the answer.

"You should work on something solid first, that the community endorses. Until you have a solid reputation as a physicist, no one will listen to what you have to say about the foundations of quantum mechanics. And even then, it's not a sure shot, believe me."

"I understand," I replied, trying to hide my obvious disappointment. "Maybe later on in my career."

"Yes, that's what I did, at any rate."

So ended my encounter with John Bell. Nowadays there is a proliferation of books on the interpretations of quantum mechanics, some good and some very bad. The good ones* tell — with larger or smaller doses of technical material — how there are two types of physicists.

The pragmatists side with Bohr and don't ask questions about what's going on, content with using the success of quantum mechanics to go on with their research. They imagine that non-locality only entails with specially prepared quantum systems, that it is washed away in the everyday world by environmental disturbances. That is to say, the world we see is well described by classical physics, there is a clear separation.

The other group (much smaller) doesn't accept things so quickly. They believe that there is more to be learned, as did Einstein and Schrödinger. They believe that to unveil the quantum mystery is to open a door to unknown aspects of reality and how we interact with it.

I am glad John Bell gave me the advice he did 30 years back. If not for his nudge, I might have threaded a very different professional path. Who knows where I'd be now? The quantum ghost, however, continues to tease me. Its weirdness has traveled with me across the years, even as my research has focused on other topics.

Maybe it's time to give life to this disquietude and see where it takes me. If I wait too long I may end up like some physicists I know, only thinking about this stuff in retirement. By then it may be too late to fully grapple with something so challenging.

*Here are some books on quantum mechanics that I recommend: David Kaiser's How the Hippies Saved Physics; David Albert's Quantum Mechanics and Experience; Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner's Quantum Enigma; Louise Gilder's The Age of Entanglement. An excellent new one is: Quantum Physics for Poets, by Christopher Hill and Leon Lederman.)

You can keep up with more of what Marcelo is thinking on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser

My dad was horrified when, at age 12, I struck out on my own and started reading comic books. He hated them. He'd raised me on a steady diet of "real" literature, from Treasure Island to Sherlock Holmes. Flimsy comics full of lurid drawings did not measure up.

Still, every week we made the trip to the newsstand and, holding his nose, he added to my paper-route money so I could dive deep into the exploits of Spiderman, the X-Men and StarLord. I tried to explain: "But Dad, these are Marvel Comics, so the characters have real problems and I'm learning new words like 'synopsis'!"

When I was older, I tried to argue that these stories were just a retelling of age-old myths in a modern form. Nothing worked. He was sure that comic books wouldn't stand the test of time.

Wow, was he wrong.

As we head into the summer blockbuster season we see, once again, the dominance of comic books in mainstream movie culture. This year it's Iron Man 3, The Wolverine (love those claws) and yet another stab at Superman (meh ... DC Comics never worked for me, but we'll see). Last year The Avengers hit us full force (Joss Whedon, please be my friend!?!), capping a multi-year run that included Thor, Captain America and The Incredible Hulk.

This year 13 movies based on comics (including eight sequels) are slated for release. In 2012, comic-book-based movies accounted for a whopping 14 percent of U.S. box office revenue. So, like it or not, comics have leapt off the page, onto the screen and into everybody's lives. They represent a huge chunk of our cultural imagination.

Let's not argue now about high vs. low culture. I'm in the midst of writing a post on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land; its beauty and depth are kicking my butt. But on the road from Tony Stark's (pretty racist) origin fighting a bunch of commies to a world where graphic novels can be just as artful as stories without drawings, something remarkable happened.

The nerds won. Our dorky compulsions and secret loves have blossomed into everyone's entertainment. Think of the huge followings garnered by The Walking Dead (originally a graphic novel) and Game of Thrones (not a comic, but something that would have been considered major dork-fodder in years past). I have no idea if this is a good thing. But I am happy to have the extra company and to see my favs come to life in big-budget Hollywood productions.

I'm a little sad, too.

Part of the joy of being a dork used to be the determined loneliness of one's science fiction/comic/fantasy compulsions. Back in the day there were only a few other dorks who knew, really knew, Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. You could drop a Hari Seldon reference and get a few sly smiles from your fellow denizen's of the sci-fi bookstore.

You had to work for your dorky cred, poring over back issues of The X-Men and Captain America to get the whole story. Now all it takes is one Google search and the history of Emma Frost rolls out for you like a bunch of oranges from a broken shopping bag.

Patton Oswalt summed it up nicely in his excellent article "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time To Die." For dorks, "There are no more hidden thought-palaces." Our favorite stories are no longer tucked away in the dark corners of nerd culture. They have now become — simply — pop culture.

My Dad it, seems, has lost. But, then again, I lost something, too.

You can keep up with more of what Adam Frank is thinking on Facebook and on Twitter: @AdamFrank4

Last month, psychologist Jamil Zaki from Stanford University launched The People's Science (TPS), a forum dedicated to bridging the gap between scientists and the public.

"I've been a big proponent of science communication for a long time," Zaki told me in an email. He was motivated to start the site in part because there's no "middle ground" between doing a lot of science communication (like a science writer) and doing none at all (like most scientists). Zaki explained:

It struck me that a forum like TPS could provide that opportunity, reduce barriers to entry for scientists to engage directly, and also offer the public a place to find out about science straight from the source, so to speak.

The website, which includes a discussion board where scientists can post "pop abstracts" explaining their findings in plain language, provides useful advice for scientists who hope to overcome common pitfalls in describing their work to non-specialists. In a tutorial geared toward scientists, Zaki writes:

Your challenge is to write as though explaining your work to an intelligent, capable relative who is totally naïve to your field and its importance.

That means more than avoiding jargon; it also means providing some context upfront so readers can appreciate why particular findings might matter.

Inspired by the goals of TPS, which resonate with many here at 13.7: Cosmos & Culture, I decided to take the challenge and write my own pop abstract. I started with the abstract from a paper with PhD student Joseph Williams and cognitive psychologist Bob Rehder, titled "The Hazards of Explanation: Overgeneralization in the Face of Exceptions." That was the "before." You can now see the "after" at the TPS forum, in a pop abstract titled "Generating explanations can make you better at learning new patterns ... even when they're not there." It was a useful exercise, and I'm eager for reader comments.

I asked Zaki what he hopes will come of The People's Science:

In an ideal world, I think TPS could provide a platform for scientists to feature their work to a broad audience and describe why they find it exciting and relevant. For non-scientists, I hope that the site can provide an insider's perspective on how scientists think, and a way to go beyond the "punchlines" of a given study and understand the process that went into it. I also think the public should be able to use this to vet other media sources, testing claims made by reporters against scientists' own descriptions. Finally, I'd like the site to be a true forum: instead of each "pop" abstract serving as a static document, I'd like non-scientists and scientists alike to be able to ask questions and engage in discussion about the work posted here. At the highest level, my dream for this site would be to help scientists and non-scientists into more dialogue, which I believe can only be a good thing for our culture at large.

It's too early to tell whether the site will take off but, like Zaki, I see potential. Here's how he frames it:

People have been almost unanimously excited about the site, which is very encouraging. I'm still waiting to see the extent to which people actually post to it, and non-scientists engage. In essence, I'm waiting for the site to pick up momentum.

My pop abstract, posted on Saturday, was the website's fifth. For now you can enjoy additional abstracts exploring the relationship between bodily sensations and emotion, connections between music and movement, attachment and social brain function, and morality and emotions, with hopefully more to come!

Addendum, added on May 7:

Readers might also be interested in a different People's Science, a book by Ruha Benjamin forthcoming from Stanford University Press. Although Zaki's website and Benjamin's book share some common goals, the two projects are independent.

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo