“The Fireplace Delusion”
Sam Harris: The reality of our situation is scientifically unambiguous: If you care about your family’s health and that of your neighbors, the sight of a glowing hearth should be about as comforting as the sight of a diesel engine idling in your living room. It is time to break the spell and burn gas—or burn nothing at all. Of course, if you are anything like my friends, you will refuse to believe this. And that should give you some sense of what we are up against whenever we confront religion. (The Daily Beast)

A Potentially Habitable Alien Planet
“It’s the Holy Grail of exoplanet research to find a planet around a star orbiting at the right distance so it’s not too close where it would lose all its water and boil away, and not too far where it would all freeze,” Steven Vogt, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Space.com. “It’s right smack in the habitable zone—there’s no question or discussion about it. It’s not on the edge, it’s right in there.” (Denise Chow, Space.com)

To Be Popular
An area of the brain associated with understanding the minds of others is larger in people who have bigger social networks, a new study finds. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

What Causes Sports Rioting?
Psychologists have labored to understand the root causes of such violence, and have been able to identify some of the crucial factors that play a role in events like the Port Said riot. (Jeff Wise, The Daily Beast)

Does the Internet Have a Soul?
At the very least, as a universe of songs, images, research projects, existential yearnings, and daily disappointments of hundreds of millions of selves, the Internet forces us to imagine in new ways the places where souls, if you believe in such things, might ultimately reside. (Lisa Miller, On Faith, The Washington Post)

When Skeptics Make Religious Art
How can such folk take up their tools in the name of God—and why would they want to do so? (Terry Teachout, The Wall Street Journal)

EXHIBIT
Stories From Another World
The exhibit will illustrate the progress of knowledge of the physical universe, from prehistoric times to recent discoveries. The exhibit is organized by the Specola Vaticana—the Vatican-supported observatory—and Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics, together with Pisa University’s physics department. (Alessandro Speciale, Religion News Service)

Why We’re Unlikely to Find Another Planet That Looks Like Earth
Astronomers are finding lots of exoplanets that are orbiting stars like the sun, significantly raising the odds that we will find a similar world. But if we do, the chance that the surface of that planet will look like ours is very small, thanks to an unlikely culprit: plants. (Mark Fischetti, Scientific American)

Top Five Regrets of the Dying
Bronnie Ware writes of the phenomenal clarity of vision that people gain at the end of their lives, and how we might learn from their wisdom. “When questioned about any regrets they had or anything they would do differently,” she says, “common themes surfaced again and again.” (Susie Steiner, guardian.co.uk)

“Creation Science” Bill Passed by Senate in Indiana
The Indiana State Senate approved a bill that would allow its schools to teach the origin stories of various religions when a class touches on the origin of life. It now moves on to the state’s House, where one of its co-sponsors is currently the Speaker of the House. Although the bill as written could be used to create a comparative religion class, its sponsor, Senator Dennis Kruse, has made it clear that he hopes to see it foster the teaching of creationism in science classes. (John Timmer, Ars Technica)

A New Strategy for Fighting Anti-Evolution Bills
Hear what Vi Simpson, the Indiana State Senate Minority Leader, had to say about the way she crippled the latest creationism-in-the-schools bill with a brilliant stratagem: by convincing the radical Republicans in the Indiana State Senate that if they want to teach Christianity in the schools, they’re also going to have to teach Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Scientology. (Tony Ortega, The Village Voice)

Best Science Pictures of 2011
Sponsored jointly by the journal Science and the National Science Foundation, the annual International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge was founded because “some of science’s most powerful statements are not made in words,” according to NSF. (Christine Dell’Amore, National Geographic)

EXHIBIT
Art by Animals
What is the difference between paintings by humans and other animals? Can animal art truly be considered ‘art’? The exhibition showcases paintings by elephants, apes, and humans, dotted throughout the existing displays of skeletons and preserved animals. (Rebecca Hill, CultureLab, New Scientist)

Why You Think Your Team Is Best
As expected, most of the volunteers were biased toward their own team, judging their players as faster, even when two hand actions were performed at identical speeds. Surprisingly, brain scans taken during the task showed that this bias arises from differences in brain activity during perception of the hand action and not during the decision-making process. (Wendy Zukerman, New Scientist)

The Moral Psychology of Jonathan Haidt
In March, Jonathan Haidt will publish The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. By laying out the science of morality—how it binds people into “groupish righteousness” and blinds them to their own biases—he hopes to drain some vitriol from public debate and enable conversations across ideological divides. (Marc Parry, The Chronicle of Higher Education)

What Would Jesus Say?
Liberal Christians tend to believe that Jesus is more conservative than they are on moral issues, while conservative Christians believe he is more liberal. Liberal and conservative Christians also tend to believe that the matters most important to Jesus are the same ones most important to them. The study findings reveal how so-called “cognitive dissonance” works in Christians whose personal beliefs aren’t identical to those of the founder of their faith, said study author Lee Ross, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. (Randy Dotinga, HealthDay)

Reconstructing Speech From Brain Activity
By peering inside the brain, it is possible to reconstruct speech from the activity that takes place when we hear someone talking. Because this brain activity is thought to be similar whether we hear a sentence or think the same sentence, the discovery brings us a step closer to broadcasting our inner thoughts to the world without speaking. (Helen Thomson, New Scientist)

Researchers Turn Mouse Skin Cells Directly Into “Neural Precursor” Cells
Bypassing stem cells, mouse skin cells have been converted directly into cells that become the three main parts of the animal’s nervous system, according to new research at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The startling success of this method seems to refute the idea that “pluripotency”—the ability of stem cells to become nearly any cell in the body—is necessary for a cell to transform from one cell type to another. (Lisa Krieger, San Jose Mercury News)

Can Thinking About Religion Replenish Self-Control?
Participants who worked on sentences with religiously oriented words exercised significantly more self-control as they completed tasks. Even after their willpower had been depleted by an unrelated task, these religious prompts were able to refuel their self-control and push them to persevere. (Hans Villarica, The Atlantic)

Using Willpower
Exerting self-control saps a person’s mental energy and makes the next desire that inevitably comes along feel more compelling and harder to resist, a study of people’s daily struggles with temptation found. (Bruce Bower, Science News)

Resisting Temptation
Unlike simply delaying gratification, promising yourself a temptation at a nebulous later date can actually decrease the amount of your ultimate consumption of that temptation. (Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience)

Videogame Pacifism
Videogames have long been assailed for their violent themes and gruesome imagery. But a small slice of players has embraced a new strategy: not killing. They are imparting real-world morals on their virtual-world characters and completing entire games on a “pacifist run”—the term for beating a blood-and-guts adventure without drawing any blood. (Conor Dougherty, The Wall Street Journal)

Newt Gingrich Says He Would Ban All Embryonic Stem Cell Research
He is drawing an increasingly hard line against the use of embryonic stem cell research—a position that contrasts not only with that of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, but also with statements that Newt Gingrich himself has made on the subject in the past. (Karen Tumulty, The Washington Post)

Q&A
Greg Feist
Psychologist Greg Feist is trying to find out what drives scientific curiosity, from ways of thinking to personality types. (Clint Witchalls, New Scientist)