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Every day of your life, you move through systems of power that other people made. Do you sense them? Do you understand power? Do you realize why it matters? Power is something we are often uncomfortable talking about. That’s especially true in civic life, how we live together in community. In a democracy, power is …
Long before Descartes famously declared, “I think, therefore I am,” and long after that, scientists and philosophers alike have puzzled over what they call the mind-body problem. Is the mind some separate, non-material entity piloting a machine of flesh? Or if it’s just a particularly elusive part of our physical body, how can it translate …
The largest organ in your body isn’t your liver or your brain. It’s your skin, with a surface area of about 20 square feet in adults. Though different areas of the skin have different characteristics, much of this surface performs similar functions, such as sweating, feeling heat and cold, and growing hair. But after a …
It’s a common saying that elephants never forget, but these magnificent animals are more than giant walking hard drives. The more we learn about elephants, the more it appears that their impressive memory is only one aspect of an incredible intelligence that makes them some of the most social, creative, and benevolent creatures on Earth. …
In 1861, two scientists got into a very brainy argument. Specifically, they had opposing ideas of how speech and memory operated within the human brain. Ernest Aubertin, with his localistic model, argued that a particular region or the brain was devoted to each separate process. Pierre Gratiolet, on the other hand, argued for the distributed …
A famous Ancient Greek once said, “Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth.” But this wasn’t some wizard claiming to perform impossible feats. It was the mathematician Archimedes describing the fundamental principle behind the lever. The idea of a person moving such a huge mass on their own might sound …
The mighty mathematics of the lever – Andy Peterson and Zack Patterson 더 보기 »
The onset of cancer usually begins as a solitary tumor in a specific area of the body. If the tumor is not removed, cancer has the ability to spread to nearby organs, as well as places far away from the origin, such as the brain. So how does cancer move to new areas, and why …
How does cancer spread through the body? – Ivan Seah Yu Jun 더 보기 »
Have you ever noticed something swimming in your field of vision? It may look like a tiny worm or a transparent blob, and whenever you try to get a closer look, it disappears, only to reappear as soon as you shift your glance. But don’t go rinsing out your eyes! What you are seeing is …
What are those floaty things in your eye? – Michael Mauser 더 보기 »
When you think of natural history museums, you probably picture exhibits filled with ancient lifeless things, like dinosaurs meteroites, and gemstones. But behind that educational exterior, which only includes about 1% of a museum’s collection, there are hidden laboratories where scientific breakthroughs are made. Beyond the unmarked doors, and on the floors the elevators won’t …
The hidden worlds within natural history museums – Joshua Drew 더 보기 »
What do an ancient Greek philosopher and a 19th century Quaker have in common with Nobel Prize-winning scientists? Although they are separated over 2,400 years of history, each of them contributed to answering the eternal question: what is stuff made of? It was around 440 BCE that Democritus first proposed that everything in the world …
