Language By Law
With 2010's Plain Writing Act, the U.S. government launched an official war against the "gobbledygook" and bureaucratize it helped create.
Arts & Letters
Faking It
The difference between the authentic and the fabricated is not always so clear.
Alone Again, Or
Scientists have been studying the calls of a whale dubbed “the loneliest whale in the world” for more than 20 years. Its calls are unusually high pitched—52 hertz, versus the typical 15-20 hertz range of blue whales. No one has ever seen the 52-hertz whale, but scientists believe he…
See Journeys
The awe-inspiring mantis shrimp. Photo by: Flickr/Silke Baron There is a long-standing puzzle about the wiring of the human eye: why was it wired backwards? The inside-out vertebrate retina has always been presented as an example of inefficient structure locked in by development and evolutionary history. Some recent research has…
Congo vs. Bonobo
In terms of untapped mineral reserves, The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is arguably the richest country in the world, with its estimated $24 trillion worth of natural resources. The DRC is a country of superlatives, with vast reserves of coltan, gold, cassiterite, and tin mined in eastern Congo,…
Cracking The Cod(ex)
The Voynich Manuscript has been called the world’s most mysterious medieval manuscript. It is an illustrated codex made of vellum, carbon-dated to the early 15th century. The manuscript is written in an unknown script and almost every page has a colorful drawing or diagram. Countless cryptographers, linguists, botanists,…
Nothing Like The Sun
Five bright angles on the future of solar energy.
Web Time
Five takes on the wonder that is the spider web.
Winston’s Rules
The UK's famous WWII Prime Minister was also a master commander of English prose and oratory.
Remembering the Rumble in the Jungle
When violent unrest broke out in Ferguson Aug.9 and several ensuing days after the police killing of a young unarmed black man, Gerald Early made the analogy to the 1964 Philadelphia race riot.