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.
In the scale of my tiny life, my mother is as timeless as Shakespeare, her insights just as relevant. I fight to remember the past tense, and then I think, Why?
Still from Navy Video by Mass Communications Specialist 1st Class Patrick Enright/Released When I was training to be a military diver, the school’s cadre often ran us out to the beach to run in formation through the loose sand of the dunes, because it was said to be…
Photo by John Griswold The Union Miners’ Cemetery in Mt. Olive, Illinois, was quiet on a recent Thursday afternoon. It sits a quarter-mile south of one of the remaining stretches of old Route 66, in a town of two thousand. The cemetery is filled with German, Italian, and Eastern…
You will dizzy yourself if you try to find today’s criteria, the organizing principles we use to categorize. Genre can be determined by historical period (regency) or geographic location (westerns); by how tightly it cleaves to established reality (fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, true crime); by what psychological needs it satisfies in us (mystery, romance, thriller); by how it uses language (poetry, essay, novel, play).
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio from Pexels Say a universal income was instituted, or you won the lottery, or were lucky enough to find a job that paid you to do what you enjoyed. What would you do if all your basic financial needs were met? My mom used…
The place Count Basie flew us to, home of romance. Home of superstition and dark ritual, too, keeping the night mysterious. The Moon has so many moods, we can moon over unrequited love and moon a frat brother for a prank and sail over the moon with delight. So much, we have projected upon that luminous orb. Including the very air we breathe.
Drugs and machines and experts spin a sense of certainty, a collaborative fantasy we all prefer. Yet a 2000 study in the British Medical Journal found doctors’ predictions accurate only twenty percent of the time—and that was for patients already diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Photo by cottonbro from Pexels. A new report from Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs warns of dangers from Artificial Intelligence (AI) unlike those from androids in dystopian science-fiction movies. This AI, the report’s author, Bruce Schneier, explains, is disembodied, specific to certain tasks, unpredictable,…
Refusing to speak someone’s name either acknowledges their power or cancels it. Some traditions refuse to speak the name of their god in a show of humility; others signal scorn the same way.