Snow Daze
Remember folding white paper again and again, then snipping it with blunt scissors to make a snowflake? The magic never ends.
Science & Nature
Richard Powers Makes Your Brain His Playground
Spoilers can be justified: without them you will need to go back and read this whole gorgeous book all over again.
Architecture Can Heal Us
Our everyday environment “used to be quaint and quirky,” Vishaan Chakrabarti writes. “Now it is mundane and monolithic.”
Some Pain, Some Gain
Science says that pain, done right, confers marked benefits. The trick, as in so many realms of life, is finding the right spot on the spectrum between what is chronic and what is manageable.
The Aural Prison of Leaf Blowers
(Wiki-CC) A Sunday school teacher taught me as a child that the Apocalypse would be ushered in by—among other signs—seven seals, seven trumpets, and seven bowls. A newspaper colleague once joked to me years ago that God had traded His seven horsemen for a phalanx of car…
Time to Rethink the Mississippi Watershed—and Design Itself
“Water is one of the most politicized things on Earth, if not the most,” Hoeferlin notes. “Yet it is apolitical. Water goes where it wants to go. It will find its way.”
Winnie the Pooh Would Have Loved This
If the bees' queen begins to falter, they induce her replacement, as political parties have been known to do. If she dies, the entire colony realizes it can no longer smell her scent, and a “queenless roar” goes up, an agitation that triggers the raising of the next queen.
Humanity’s Tiny, Ultra-Durable Insurance Policy
The “eternity crystal,” was developed by a team inside the Optoelectronics Research Centre at England’s University of Southampton. Using lasers at blindingly fast speeds, the research team inscribed this tiny disc with all the genetic information a mad scientist would need to fuse it with synthesized material and existing cells to bring humanity back from whatever brink—nuclear annihilation, climate change, asteroid shower—marked our end.
Flowers Have Mastered the Art of Seduction
The wild and crazy things a flower will do to get laid
The Man Who Saw Missouri’s Beauty
A fresh look at the Katy and Rock Island trails—and the difference they make.