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“Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and others have greatness thrust upon them”, quoth William Shakespeare. Or did he? Some people question whether Shakespeare really wrote the works that bear his name, or whether he even existed at all. They speculate that Shakespeare was a pseudonym for another writer, or a group of writers. …
Did Shakespeare write his plays? – Natalya St. Clair and Aaron Williams 더 보기 »
Where does all this stuff come from? This rock? That cow? Your heart? Not the things themselves, mind you, but what they’re made of: the atoms that are the fabric of all things. To answer that question, we look to the law of conservation of mass. This law says take an isolated system defined by …
Right now, you’re probably sitting down to watch this video and staying seated for a few minutes to view it is probably okay. But the longer you stay put, the more agitated your body becomes. It sits there counting down the moments until you stand up again and take it for a walk. That may …
Which of these entities has evolved the ability to manipulate an animal many times its size? The answer is all of them. These are all parasites, organisms that live on or inside another host organism, which they harm and sometimes even kill. Parasite survival depends on transmitting from one host to the next, sometimes through …
How parasites change their host’s behavior – Jaap de Roode 더 보기 »
For most of human history, medical workers sought to treat diseases or cure them. The rise of vaccination in the 19th century enhanced the potential to prevent people from contracting illnesses in the first place. But only in recent decades did it become possible to ensure that a particular disease never threatens humanity again. The …
Learning from smallpox: How to eradicate a disease – Julie Garon and Walter A. Orenstein 더 보기 »
What is reality, knowledge, the meaning of life? Big topics you might tackle figuratively explaining existence as a journey down a road or across an ocean, a climb, a war, a book, a thread, a game, a window of opportunity, or an all-too-short-lived flicker of flame. 2,400 years ago, one of history’s famous thinkers said …
How does this music make you feel? Do you find it beautiful? Is it creative? Now, would you change your answers if you learned the composer was this robot? Believe it or not, people have been grappling with the question of artificial creativity, alongside the question of artifcial intelligence, for over 170 years. In 1843, …
Hey, congratulations! You’ve just won the lottery, only the prize isn’t cash or a luxury cruise. It’s a position in your country’s national legislature. And you aren’t the only lucky winner. All of your fellow lawmakers were chosen in the same way. This might strike you as a strange way to run a government, let …
What did democracy really mean in Athens? – Melissa Schwartzberg 더 보기 »
Have you ever been waiting in line at the grocery store, innocently perusing the magazine rack, when a song pops into your head? Not the whole song, but a fragment of it that plays and replays until you find yourself unloading the vegetables in time to the beat. You’ve been struck by an earworm, and …
Earworms: Those songs that get stuck in your head – Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis 더 보기 »
It’s midnight and all is still, except for the soft skittering of a gecko hunting a spider. Geckos seem to defy gravity, scaling vertical surfaces and walking upside down without claws, adhesive glues or super-powered spiderwebs. Instead, they take advantage of a simple principle: that positive and negative charges attract. That attraction binds together compounds, …
