January 7 -11 Erik wonders if canaries have musical taste. Guest poster Roberta Kwok tells the story of unusual evidence from a heartbreaking crime scene. Nausea — hyperemesis in particular — is a lot more interesting than you think it is, Michelle finds. Guest poster Erin Gettler demonstrates that there’s no shortage of wild things […]
Month: January 2013
Around 2 AM on July 16, 2005, graduate students Benjamin Boussert, Giulia Adesso, and Jason Choy left a dance party in San Francisco and started driving home to Berkeley, where they were studying chemistry. Boussert spent his days experimenting with tiny crystals, while Adesso investigated the properties of nanoparticles and Choy used lasers to […]
I’m not in the habit of feeling sorry for members of the British royal family. But last month, when the press reported that a pregnant Kate Middleton had been hospitalized with hyperemesis gravidarum, my stomach lurched in sympathy. Pregnancy-related hyperemesis is usually described as “severe morning sickness,” but that doesn’t capture the suffering it involves. […]
In 1804, Thomas Jefferson commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to catalog the wildlife and geography of North America. They spent two years searching the continent, documenting their finds as they asked, “What’s that? And that? And what’s that?” I conduct my expeditions the same way today. I have dozens of see-and-ID encounters every time […]
My husband and I have been in the same apartment for more than four years. It’s a truly lovely place — spacious (for New York) with high ceilings, stained glass, and parquet wood floors. Each room has the appropriate furniture and many of the walls have been painted a color of my own choosing. We […]
I have this theory. It’s not rocket science (which, by the way, rocket scientists tell me ain’t exactly brain surgery) and it’s not brain surgery (which brain surgeons tell me ain’t exactly rocket science). It goes like this: décor in your office is a reflection of your inner science nerd. You see, far more than […]
31 December – 4 January Well, I guess we made it through 2012 without dying. So, drink up and get back to work. Heather wrote about the strange therapeutic, cultural, and linguistic history of the tattoo. Guest poster Emily Underwood examined a part of the body so complicated that it requires 10,000 processors to simulate. […]
I don’t care if they’re real. I’m just grateful for the texting fails collected on DamnYouAutocorrect. Maybe a guy really did offer to cook his girlfriend “chicken vaginas” instead of chicken fajitas; maybe a mom described her toddlers as having “pornstaches” instead of milkstaches in their Christmas photos; maybe a dad told his kids that […]
