CategorySCIENCE

The Groupon advertisement said these sensory-deprivation sessions relax the mind. They start by placing you at square one—stripped all the way down to your skin. A session starts with a shower in which the dirt and grime of the world is scrubbed and shampooed away. Next you step into the tank. It’s warmed to the surface temperature of human skin and has about one thousand pounds of Epsom salt...

“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little cat, who promptly hissed at me with all his tiny might. Hissing Sid, as he became affectionately known, was one of a colony of feral cats that my colleagues and I went on to rescue from the grounds of the...

There is a story my family likes to tell: a moment I cannot remember. I am a toddler, still chubby-cheeked, with a blunt blond bob. I am standing in the yard of my childhood home. In front of me, my father has begun butchering the family pig. This is his work, his vocation. He is a butcher. Its how he earns his livelihood, and its how he keeps us alive. Hes been doing this work professionally...

Nothing compares to a peregrine falcon. Of course, comparing anything in nature is foolhardy. Nonetheless, when beholding this bird, perched or flying, one can only think of superlatives. Strikingly beautiful, masked face, the fastest animal, and a gaze of majesty knowing the ages. Bold and powerful. Untouchable. If you have seen it, you know what we mean—the falcon epitomizes the raw power and...

Like many before him and many after, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) imagined a utopia. The Dominican friar envisioned a more perfect world at the turn of the seventeenth century, just as Spanish imperial power had transformed his homeland into a wayward province. In his thirtieth year, Campanella had returned home to Calabria, in Southern Italy, after a brush with the Inquisition. Increasingly...

When we enter the Natural History Museum, South Kensington, with five million other visitors each year, we step simultaneously into the age of the dinosaurs and into the Victorian age. We inhabit a grand Romanesque hall successfully campaigned for by Richard Owen, still awed by the terrible lizards that he named, and that he had carefully boxed over from the British Museum collection in the early...

Charged with hindsight and consequence, the origin stories of landmark inventions make up, at this point, a genre of their own (e.g. The Imitation Game, The Social Network, and Hidden Figures). Any film that attends to a STEM breakthrough in particular has to deal with a daunting problem: how do you dramatize an esoteric subject for a general audience? The STEM movie of the summer, Oppenheimer...

In 2017, almost a hundred years after insulin was defensively patented for the express purpose of preventing unethical profiteering, Alec Smith was found dead in his Minneapolis home at only 26 years old. He had been diagnosed with T1DM two years previously, but seemed to have adapted well to the demands of insulin treatment. What had gone wrong? Smiths great misfortune was that he had been lucky...

Words are combined into phrases and sentences in a dazzling array of patterns, collectively referred to as syntax. The complexity of syntax has long confounded researchers. Consider, for example, the previous sentence. There are all sorts of patterns in the order of the words of that sentence, patterns that are familiar to you and me and other speakers of English. Those patterns are critical to...

A specter is haunting the landscapethe specter of generative AI. First came fears that student cheating would explode, plus that artists and actors would be unemployed. Then the ante was upped: Some of the very technologys creators warned that AIs potential risk to humanity as we know it was on par with pandemics and nuclear war. This cascade of angst was triggered by the launch of ChatGPT by...