If greed is good, as Gordon Gekko proclaimed in the 1987 movie Wall Street, then economics ought to be a superlative science. After all, at the core of economic theory sits a greedy idealization of human nature known as Homo economicus. It’s a fictitious species that represents the individual economic agent, motivated by selfishness. H. economicus is completely rational, by which economists mean it’s out for itself. And selfishness is supposedly the smart strategy when competing for the resources needed to survive. As Gordon Gekko also mentioned, greed “captures the essence of the evolu...

Dow drops follow weeks when more people search Google for ‘debt’ or ‘stocks.’ (p. 16)

Last year, J.C. Penney CEO Ron Johnson put an end to “fake prices,” the ones that customers see but rarely pay because of coupons and sales. Instead, the clothing retailer decided to sell items at cheaper everyday prices in an effort to “stop playing games” with consumers. By June, Johnson had conceded that this strategy wasn’t working. Penney brought back coupons in September; the return of clearance racks soon followed. But it may have been too late for Johnson; he got the boot on April 8 after a mere 17 months on the job. Johnson may have thought he was doing customers a favor by...

Give a man a fish and he’ll have a seafood supper. Teach a man engineering principles and he could start an aquafarm, devise a better net or fishing pole or maybe even come up with an entirely new way to combat chronic fishlessness. That’s the premise behind a nonprofit organization called Future Scientist that teaches people to use basic science and engineering to solve problems — and then encourages them to teach others to do the same. The group is the brainchild of biological engineers Gautham Venugopalan (below, right) of the University of California, Berkeley and Richard Novak (bel... (p. 36)

Larger settings seem to promote segregation, simulation finds. (p. 16)

The administration’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2014 lifts nondefense research spending by 9 percent.

Science is an oddly successful enterprise. On the whole, it provides an impressive guide to reality. From antibiotics and atomic bombs to laser beams and X-rays, science enables humans to forge powerful tools from nature’s secrets. Yet many aspects of science are deeply flawed, from the politicization of research funding to widespread misuse of math in analyzing data. In this respect science is not so different from human biology. Magnificent organisms capable of composing symphonies, calculating quantum energy levels and dunking basketballs are built from DNA molecules containing 90 perce...

Graduate student Craig Ulrich carried out his first published research project not in a university lab, but as a prison inmate. In 2004 Ulrich accidentally shot and killed a college classmate. Convicted of first-degree manslaughter (which in Washington state means a death caused through recklessness), he ended up at the Cedar Creek Corrections Center in Littlerock, Wash. His college background in biology made him a perfect candidate to work in the facility’s composting program, set up by Evergreen State College in nearby Olympia. Data he collected appeared in a 2009 research paper showing t... (p. 32)