Fear of Flushing
The need to flush is basic and practical, and we maybe should have taught one another better before we handed off such an intimate task. But tech addicts us, and free enterprise lives on.
Science & Nature
Slouching Toward Chatbots
In some ways, we seem to want AI to replace us. Or at least to replace the people too foolish to fall in love with us or too impatient to adore our flaws.
The Brilliant Dr. William Beaumont: Unethical or Just Aloof?
The Missouri State Medical Association describes Dr. William Beaumont as “beloved by all who knew him.”Except perhaps the man in closest proximity.
The Master of the Nuclear War Machine
Here is the story of how the development of nuclear power that had peacetime possibilities and Hyman Rickover’s personality merged at an essential moment to create a reactor that worked by 1953. Someone else could have developed the nuclear sub, but no one could have done it as quickly and as well as Rickover did.
Sweden’s Mysterious Sleeping Sickness: Psychosomatic or Coerced?
In the past two decades, more than one thousand children have taken anxiety and dread deep into their bodies, falling into what has been named uppgivenhetssyndrom, a giving-up we translate as “resignation syndrome.” They withdraw into a catatonic state, showing no response to stimulus, sustained for months or even years by a feeding tube and diapers.
The Genes That Make Us Human—and How We Thwart Them
A new study is the first to identify 267 genes that distinguish modern humans from chimpanzees and Neanderthals. Nearly all those 267 genes helped shape the behaviors that distinguish us: creativity, self-awareness, cooperativeness, and the ability to do what doctors always nag us to do, take active steps to make sure we lead a long and healthy life.
Fair Weather’s Friends
Though I rarely drive farther than a few miles from home, I am paying inordinate attention to the weather forecast. Maybe this is because I have been cut off for a year from other places I used to feel part of, or because I spend so much more time outside now.But I could also be succumbing to family tradition.
Black Holes and Psychic Vampires
My child-brain pictures a monster waiting to consume me, but black holes are not monsters. They are not even things. A black hole, explains astrophysicist Janna Levin, is nothing: “pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It’s empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.”
How to Talk to Your Family About Climate Change
As a biologist and science communicator, I sometimes have friends and relatives ask for advice on defending scientific topics to skeptical groups, especially climate change. In an era where misinformation runs rampant, this is a desire that is perhaps as admirable as it is foolhardy; on social media, the trolls…
When DNA Becomes Data
In the past 10-20 years, we have seen a lot of data storage methods come and go, each type bigger and better than the last. As a child of the early 1990s, my first introduction to data storage devices was the floppy disk. These disks stored about 1.4 MB, a…