On April 22, Jason Stephany, a researcher in a yeast lab, received an email from his co-worker, a woman whose husband has a fast-growing blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). She explained that her husband would need a bone marrow transplant. In patients with ALL, the bone marrow produces hordes of immature white blood […]
Month: May 2011
Something is curiously missing in most Old Master paintings of David and Goliath. The famous story from the Old Testament focuses on David’s feat of killing a nine-foot-tall warrior kitted out in mail armor with just one, perfectly aimed slingshot. Yet when 16th and 17th century artists went to paint this story of the biblical […]
It’s not every day that a flight is delayed because there are too few people on board. But, blame Will and Kate, Brits just weren’t flying out of London last Friday. As a result, the Virgin Atlantic A340-600 called Ladybird was carrying only 112 of her usual 380 passengers. So before we could take off, […]
How would you describe the Minute Waltz, by 19th-Century composer Frédéric François Chopin? Lighthearted and whimsical? Dainty, delicate, fragile? In some classical music circles, Chopin’s work has a sissy reputation. As a Washington Post critic wrote last year, “Chopin’s music has sometimes been branded effeminate, or ‘salon music’: not quite serious, not quite healthy.” Chopin […]
A year on and many thousands of leaked documents later, it’s easy to forget how Wikileaks first came to wide international attention. But a recent paper in Psychological Science brought the memory back to me with a sharpness and intensity out of all proportion with the grainy YouTube video at the incident’s core. The memory […]