(September 26, 2024)
"Our [Stone Age] brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it." — Matthew Shaer, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 1,...
(September 12, 2024)
"The brain is a 3-pound mass you can hold in your hand that can conceive of a universe 100 billion light-years across." Marian Diamond, neuroscientist In 2021, a peer-reviewed scientific...
(August 29, 2024)
When I asked self-styled "museum artist" Beth Zaiken if I could use her evocative painting of a mammoth for a story, she was quick to point out that the image...
(August 15, 2024)
Continuing from last week, here's more on why I think talk of exploring and colonizing Mars is a boondoggle at this stage. Water is going to be a Big Deal. Actually,...
(August 8, 2024)
My love affair with Mars goes back decades, when I'd hang out with members of the Mars Underground, a small group of University of Boulder science alumni who ate, talked...
(July 25, 2024)
The philosopher and gadfly Daniel Dennett, who died in April, wrote that evolution by natural selection was "the single best idea anyone has ever had." The word "anyone" implies a...
(July 11, 2024)
Last week, I outlined the importance of vitamin D for healthy bodies and how recommendations for adequacy published in 2011 were, in retrospect, far too extreme. To understand why vitamin...
(July 4, 2024)
Vitamin D is essential for a healthy body, in particular, strong bones. The sunlight-bone link was recognized nearly 200 years ago, when dark, smoky skies in newly industrialized cities...
(June 20, 2024)
It's summer solstice — and therefore puzzle — time again! Here are some of the best puzzles to have come my way in the last 12 months for your...
(June 6, 2024)
"Last night." — Fictional lone genius Tony Stark answering when he became an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics If you believe everything you see on the silver screen, you know all...
(May 23, 2024)
"I knew that [mRNA] can be used for everything and I had a kind of a Cassandra feeling, that I can see the future and nobody believes me." Katalin Karikó,...
(May 9, 2024)
Last week, I presented arguments supporting the anti-Stratfordian case, that Stratford's "Shakspere" wasn't the sublime writer William Shakespeare. If the man from Stratford didn't write the Shakespearean canon, who did?...
(May 2, 2024)
"They're both bonkers!" — Stanley Wells, Britain's leading Shakespeare expert, on the opinion of preeminent Shakespearean actors Sirs Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance, that the Stratford man didn't write the...
(April 25, 2024)
On April 26, 1564, 460 years ago, the baptism of one "William Shakspere" was recorded in the provincial town of Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. According to the conventional story, this...
