It’s a simple piece, made by my paternal great-grandfather, what one might call a “moveable kitchen counter,” with shelves on top going up to the ceiling. Underneath are four drawers down the center, ...

For our brain, animate and inanimate objects belong to different categories and any information about them is stored and processed by different networks. A study shows that there is also another ...

Whenever we look at something unfamiliar for the first time, it's only human nature that we look for the familiar in it. Even given the huge variety of what turns up in the animal kingdom, it's only ...

Facial recognition is just one way that people differentiate one person from another, but it's not unique to humans; non-human primates innately exhibit this ability too. Recognizing facial features ...

Typically, robots are built to perform a single task. To make them more adaptable, researchers from Yale University have developed a kind of “robotic skin” that transforms ordinary objects into ...

Seeing faces in common objects is not unusual. You might have seen the “man in the moon”, or seen faces in electrical outlets or sliced bell peppers. A new study from the National Institute of Mental ...

The first in a series of articles about all of the weird things that people put in places in their body, which then get stuck there. In short, decisions that make absolutely no sense. Location.

If superstition constitutes mental illness, then indeed I am mental, for it has been my lifelong habit to punish any inanimate object that hurts me. Let's say I bruise my toe walking into an ottoman.

To be an inanimate object must be, I fancy, a very uninteresting affair. Certainly, being one appears to have a disastrous effect upon the disposition. No one who has had any intercourse with ...