Marcelo Gleiser
Marcelo Gleiser is a contributor to the NPR blog 13.7: Cosmos & Culture. He is the Appleton Professor of Natural Philosophy and a professor of physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College.
Gleiser is the author of the books The Prophet and the Astronomer (Norton & Company, 2003); The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (Dartmouth, 2005); A Tear at the Edge of Creation(Free Press, 2010); and The Island of Knowledge (Basic Books, 2014). He is a frequent presence in TV documentaries and writes often for magazines, blogs and newspapers on various aspects of science and culture.
He has authored over 100 refereed articles, is a Fellow and General Councilor of the American Physical Society and a recipient of the Presidential Faculty Fellows Award from the White House and the National Science Foundation.
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The waters of genetic meddling are murky; in a new book, technology futurist Jamie Metzl reviews where we've been in the past as a guideline for where we might be headed.
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The physicist's posthumous book highlights his belief in the rationality of nature and in our ability to uncover its secrets — and a faith in science's ability to solve humanity's biggest problems.
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The diversity of life on Earth, and its ever-growing complexity, leads many people to think that there must be a purpose to its existence. Commentator Marcelo Gleiser argues that, quite the contrary, the only purpose of life is to preserve itself. There is no hidden hand behind it all.
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Dark matter, which surrounds most galaxies, plays a key role in the structure of the cosmos. But we can't see it. Or can we? Recently, astronomers used a remarkable effect predicted by Einstein to spot a very tenuous bridge of dark matter linking two galaxy clusters.