** The study was published earlier this month in Nature Methods. Many thanks to Andrea Facheris of Soundtrack4u for granting permission to use the music in the video. The song is called “Symphony 5” (a reworking of Beethoven’s), by the Robot Symphony Orchestra.
Mind/Brain
I spent the past two days at the Science Writing in the Age of Denial conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The event explored the phenomenon of denial and what it means for science writers. How can journalists effectively convey science when its uncomfortable truths face organized resistance?
The granddaughters came to visit for the weekend. They’re hitting puberty hard. One of them suddenly has a throaty voice, long magenta hair that she wants to cut all off, just leave the bangs, and is currently grounded for injudicial actions. The other one’s glasses slide down her nose; she’s wearing white cut-off leggings with […]
When I was in junior high, my family moved to a house in the country. The dining room table sat beneath a vent designed to allow heat to rise from the main floor into my mom’s bedroom upstairs. Unfortunately the vent also served as a conduit for noise. The soft clink of metal spoons against […]
This past weekend I spent too many hours on Netflix watching Lie to Me, the Fox television drama that ran from 2009 to 2011. It’s a crime procedural (my favorite genre) about Dr. Cal Lightman, a psychologist who can spot liars by analyzing their body language and super-fast facial ticks, called microexpressions. On the show, Lightman’s […]
For as long as I can remember, I have counted. If I’m on a train I might count the electric lines we pass or the rows in my car or the number of windows on each side of the aisle. When I’m bicycling, I count pedal strokes. It’s not something I do deliberately; I’ll […]
One day last fall I stood in the middle of the meunasah, or community meeting hall, in a remote Indonesian village trying to explain who I am and what I was doing there. A few dozen people sat on straw mats sipping bottled water and snacking on fried plantain strips, watching me expectantly. The village […]
About a decade before my father died, he asked me to start collecting rocks for him. I didn’t fully understand why, but since I was studying geology at the time, I began to pick them up wherever I visited. Limestone from the Alps; granite from New Zealand. He kept the rocks I collected on a […]
