CategorySCIENCE

Over the years, Einstein received a lot of letters from children. “I am a little girl of six,” one announced in large letters drawn haphazardly across the full width of the writing paper. “I saw your picture in the paper. I think you ought to have a haircut, so you can look better.” Having given her advice, the girl, with model formality, signed it, “Cordially yours, Ann.” “I have a problem I...

A message had arrived at the telegram office that morning. As the mailman approached the seaside apartment in Mumbai, India, that my grandfather Brij Kishore shared with my grandmother Chandrakanta and their four children, he felt his throat tighten as she pulled on his sleeve and said, Taar aaya hai. In Bombay in the 1960s, the arrival of a taara telegramusually meant bad news. Few homes had...

Imagine our world without writing. No pencils, no pens, no paper, no grocery lists. No chalkboards, typewriters or printing-presses, no letters or books. No computers or word-processors, no e-mail or Internet, no social media; and without binary codestrings of ones and zeroes that create computer programsno viewable archives of film or television, either. Writing evolved to perform tasks that...

Time To Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children draws on thousands of pages of internal documents and over 100 hours of interviews with clinicians and service users.  One service user, Jacob’s, story is told here. * Jacob has never really seen himself as a girl. “Even when I was like a toddler, I would go by names from male characters I saw on TV,”...

You may have heard a story about women astronauts of the 1978 NASA class being given an absurd amount of tampons by clueless techs. It goes like this: Kathy Sullivan and Sally Ride, both members of the ’78 class, are asked to check a hygiene kit for women in space. Ride begins pulling out a series of tampons fused together in small sealed packages, sort of like links of sausage. And they just...

Hosted by Andrew Keen, Keen On features conversations with some of the worlds leading thinkers and writers about the economic, political, and technological issues being discussed in the news, right now. Andrew talks to David J. Helfand, author of The Universal Timekeepers, about the power of atomic science to unveil the mysteries of unreachably remote time and space. Find more Keen On episodes...

The Marabou stork is a scavenger bird usually found on the African continent south of the Sahara. Like most storks, it has long legs and a long, stout bill, perfectly engineered for catching fish and small aquatic animals, but the Marabou stork is even more unique in its appearance—and dietary preference. Bald-headed and scabbed, sporting large, reddish air sacs on their necks, and reeking of...

Liquids are shape-shifters. Part of the definition of a liquid is that it takes the shape of whatever container you put it in (which is why there have been occasional investigations into whether cats qualify). The Earths gravity pulls liquid seawater towards the center of the planet, and so the ocean has filled the regions of Earths surface which are closest to the middle. But for all its lumps...

For my first trip I would receive a “super-dose” of ketamine intravenously while having my brain scanned in a 3-Tesla fMRI machine. Unless I was lucky, in which case it would be a high dose of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), lying between the large rings of a PET (positron emission tomography) scanner. This was the psychonautical equivalent of a three-star Anthology meal at the Fat Duck, or a...

Im going to give you the bad news first. The distances between stars are so large that they might be impossible to routinely cross. Sure, maybe you send robot probes that reach their target in two hundred years (and then you need another century or so for a message to get back). But the possibility that you, I, or anybody else can pop around to the best vacation planets in the galactic empire may...