In the photo, Karen is smiling. We’re clowning around, engulfed in a spring day with nowhere to be but out on our bikes. Breast cancer has already pushed its way into Karen’s life, but the demon is on hiatus, and she has gleefully stuffed her bra to announce that cancer can take her breasts but […]
Christie
Back in February, a scandal broke out at Susan G. Komen for the Cure®, the breast cancer advocacy group with the trademarked pink ribbon. That scandal centered around the group’s decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood’s cancer screening efforts. But the flap over Planned Parenthood obscured an even more scandalous problem at Komen — the group’s […]
24 – 28 September In which Cameron informs us that gull poop carries drug resistant bacteria that infests beaches, lakes and even dumps. Delightful stories abound of the falcons and dogs that have been dispatched to chase them off. But that makes me wonder: after they’re chased off, where do they take their pestilent cargo? […]
My mother sent me an old letter recently. It was a handwritten note scrawled across two pages that she’d written to her sister more than 30 years ago. My family had just moved to West Germany, where my dad was stationed in the Air Force, and in the letter Mom describes for her sister the […]
September 10 – 14 Virginia says drinking to forget doesn’t work. What does work is pot. Maybe good cooks are really, sneakily good scientists, says Cameron. Whether city living makes you itchy and cranky, Science is not sure. Cassandra is. Autumn is so lovely, says Christie, but what with global warming you might not […]
Autumn. It’s perhaps my favorite time of year. Ski season is just around the corner and the tomatoes in the garden have reached their peak. A few late peaches remain, and our pears and apples are perfectly ripening. The sun’s angle in the sky intensifies the light and makes the landscape appear especially vivid and […]
It’s time for another edition of Thank God It’s Penis Friday! As many as 99 percent of us get a song stuck in our heads at some point. This may happen because the song sparks a cognitive itch or because it contains a repetitive motif that the brain latches onto and starts echoing. Researchers have a name […]
August 13 – 17 In his second guest post, Erik Vance tells us that, with regard to end-of-the-world prophecies, we’re doing it wrong. Christie wonders how sincere repentant dopers really are. Abstruse Goose considers the success rate of astrobiology. Guest poster Nicholas Sunzeff wonders if cosmology is a meaningful endeavour in a world filled with […]