Forget about crystals, candles, Eastern philosophy, and about sitting and breathing in awkward ways. Meditation research explores how the brain works when we refrain from concentration, rumination and intentional thinking. Electrical brain waves suggest that mental activity during meditation is wakeful and relaxed.

It’s often helpful for cognitive scientists modeling psychological processes to describe the mind’s functional architecture using boxes and arrows, with the boxes indicating various functionally discrete processes or systems and the arrows indicating the causal or functional relationships among those discrete processes or systems.

Why has the Big Bang theory become the standard model for understanding the origins of the universe?

MIT researchers show how circadian rhythms in bacteria control their rate of reproduction.

A new species of dinosaur, a relative of the famous Velociraptor, has been discovered in Inner Mongolia by two PhD students.

Stay and fight, or flee? These are usually the alternatives facing a victim when it is attacked by an enemy. Two researchers from Lund University have now collected various examples from the animal world where the victim makes use of another possibility.

When GlaxoSmithKline bought ToddStiefel's family business for $2.9 billion last April, he began to think about what to do with the rest of his life.

Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known.

Researchers have long been puzzled by large societies in which strangers routinely engage in voluntary acts of kindness, respect and mutual benefit even though there is often an individual cost involved.

The key to human individuality may lie not in our genes, but in the sequences that surround and control them, according to new research by scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Yale University.

Although the story of the Big Bang in its essence is quite simple and straightforward, it contains many fascinating subtleties that are worth exploring further. It is good to get some conceptual hurdles and misconceptions out of the way right now.

Australia's dingo and the New Guinea Singing Dog may be the world's oldest dog breeds, according to a major new genetic study into the domestication of the animal dubbed man's best friend.

The Corot satellite strikes again with another fascinating planet discovery. This time, the newly discovered gas giant planet may have an interior that closely resembles those of Jupiter and Saturn in our own Solar System.

Stress during pregnancy may raise the risk of asthma in offspring, according to researchers at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.

In this intriguing post philosophers Eric Schwitzgebel and Blake Myers examine the theory that knowledge is justified true belief.