Question of the Year: What is Life, Anyway?

As we near the end of 2010, everybody’s talking about the biggest science stories of the year. I’ve been thinking about these four: May 20: Craig Venter’s team synthesizes a bacterial genome in the lab, sticks it into an empty bacterial cell, and watches it replicate. Venter calls it the “first synthetic cell“; many headlines prefer […]

Mouse tail opens, shuts global insurance case

A container full of sterile goods left Eastern China one day and ended up, four months later, in the Netherlands. As unpackers were rummaging through packing material, they turned up a tiny mummified mouse. The goods, evidently, were not sterile. They were insured, though, and the insurance company needed to figure out who was to […]

The Art of the Insect

Earlier this week I was tickled by a study about dancing insects. European honey bees perform a rump-shaking ‘waggle dance’ in order to tell their hivemates where they’ve found food. The new research showed that when the bees don’t get any sleep, their dance moves become spasmatic and repellent; they clear the floor like a […]

Bold and Italicize Your Way to a Better Memory

Let’s say I were writing a book about the norgletti, a fictional extraterrestrial species, and had the choice of these four typefaces. If I asked you which one would make your reading experience most pleasurable, the choice would be obvious. The first three fonts are brash, clumsy, juvenile and just plain difficult to read. What […]

Palm Revelations

Last week, I had my palm read for the first time. I was spending the day with scientists who study the microscopic bugs living on our skin. (It’s actually not as creepy or smelly as you might think.) One of the researchers, a young and energetic dermatologist, was giving me the grand tour of the […]

On Turkey Legs

This story is so kooky that I must lead with the video: This slow-motion film stars turkeys of different ages, from hatchlings to adults, and yes, they’re furiously climbing a steep wooden ramp. The video comes from a study published earlier this month. But let me start at the beginning.

The Language(s) of Time

Time flies; it passes; it marches on. Time can be hard, ripe, rough or sharp. It can be saved, spent, managed. I make dinner reservations ahead of time, and push back deadlines. I look forward to Christmas in New York. My teenaged years are over (woohoo!). ‘Time’ is the most common noun in English, and all of […]

Blue Light Special

It’s the end of October—a dark time, and not only because of Halloween ghouls. Today in New York City, we won’t see the sun until 7:19am, and we’ll have to say good-bye at 6:00pm. Each passing day will be distressingly shorter than the day before, until December 21, when the sun will set at 4:31pm, […]