The Mellow Season
More than other seasons in which we go on vacation or complain about ice, fall tends to bring out the scholar in most people.
Arts & Letters
Bikel Remembered, And Linked
Theodore Meir Bikel remembered
Mosquitoes. What Are They Good For?
Mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others. The implications for world health are enormous.
Animal, Vegetable, Intelligence
The humble cockatoo. Smarter than you think. (CC: David Cook Wildlife Photography) Plant neurobiologists argue the ways in which plants demonstrate behaviors that look very much like intelligence, memory, learning, and decision-making. Rather than relying on a brain and neurons, plants use a decentralized network, but both plants and…
Let It Bee
No one will starve to death if honeybees disappea. But our food choices will be severely limited.
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.
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,…