Guest poster Mary Caperton Morton wrote a lovely post about poison oak a few years back, but I just had this itch… I saw an old friend—or foe, I guess—on a run last weekend. Leafless during winter, the poison oak in a nearby park has started to push out shiny green triads along the trail […]
Month: May 2013
May 6 – 10 This week, LWON spawn Virginia Hughes returns to the mothership to ask: Isn’t it a waste to spend precious years of our waking lives in service to death? People with discipline are more satisfied with less, says Jessa. People with self-control deficiencies want more. Christie considers the difference between a study […]
As a freelance writer, I spend a lot of my time in contented isolation. But lately I’ve been appreciating a particular kind of social network. It’s not my intimate circle of family and friends, wonderful though that is. It’s not the choppy, wide-open seas of Twitter and Facebook, though those have their place as well. […]
So many press releases land in my inbox that I don’t have time to read them all. But a recent release from the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ) caught my eye — “Treatment by naturopathic doctors shows reduction in cardiovascular risk factors. Randomized controlled trial.” This would be big news if it were true. Naturopathic […]
Clenching your muscles increases self-control. So does having a loud super-ego, or at least some form of inner monologue. Isolation disrupts our will power, as does having too much dopamine in our systems, like ADHD sufferers chronically do. Sugar boosts self-control. So does a short burst of exercise. For smokers, the same restorative effect happens […]
LWON is a group blog run semi-anarchically by 12 science writers. If you think that sounds like a recipe for chaos, just contemplate SciLance, an even more anarchic group of 35 science writers. Usually, SciLance is just a discussion group, so the chaos is relatively subdued. But last week, the writers of SciLance published their […]
I spent several hours on Sunday afternoon in what has to be the most charming cemetery in New York City. If I didn’t know what I was looking for, I would have missed its arched iron gate, tucked into 2nd Avenue just north of East 2nd Street, where the East Village meets the Lower East Side. Once through, […]
29 April – 3 May This week, Richard’s new book came out! Oh, nothing, just the one he co-authored with Temple Grandin about the autistic brain. I don’t know how to put this, but he’s kind of a big deal. Jessa and Ann ask him many questions. And yet, in middle of a busy book-signing schedule, Richard […]