Commentary invited by editors of Scientific American
thump TAP. thump thump TAP. Melissa McClelland’s soft brown cowboy boots tap sharply on a hollow wooden platform. The sparse sound opens Whitehorse’s Killing Time and provides the song’s rhythmic backbone...
How do you get a thousand engineers to agree on the design a complex product in a timely way? How do you design such a product to be modular, so that portions of it can be more easily changed or upgraded at different rates?...
In September, as the fire season slows and the smoke clears, it’s obvious that 2012 was another big, bad year for wildfires. With a heat wave, a drought, and fires taking out thousands of homes in Colorado Springs and elsewhere, it seemed like everyone was talking about the weird weather this summer...
In 1964, the US enacted the civil rights act, the Vietnam War was heating up, and the battle against cancer was being waged. That year, Dr. Jerome Horwitz published what was, by all accounts, a failure...
Researcher Eugenie Clark is 90 years old. Her office shelves are lined with gaping shark jaws. One is from a tiger shark. It bit her once—the only shark bite of her life.She was driving to talk to a student group, and the shark jaw sat on the passenger seat...
"A 24 year old healthy female in her usual state of health presents with acute 10/10 diffuse abdominal pain, anorexia and nausea. On physical exam she exhibits peritonitis, with rebound tenderness in the right lower quadrant, reproducible with palpation in the left lower quadrant." A typical summary of a patient one might see in the emergency room...
Headlines like “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” or “Is the Internet Making Us Dumber?” quite clearly show that people are concerned about what the Internet is doing to our cognition.
From 4-6 September 2012, I attended the Journées Hubert Curien de la Culture Scientifique et Technique, an international conference on science communication, in Nancy, France...
By the time he put the finishing touches on the Rite of Spring in November of 1912 in the Châtelard Hotel in Clarens, Switzerland, Stravinsky had spent three years studying Russian pagan rituals, Lithuanian folk songs and crafting the dissonant sacre chord, in which an F-flat major combines with an E-flat major with added minor seventh...
Twenty years ago I joined my high school's football team and over the next four years became intimately acquainted with pasta - the delicious flavor and al dente texture, the margherita and alfredo sauces that could drown it, and the marvelous butter and garlic soaked breads that could accompany it...
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