An infant died of whooping cough in Australia recently. She was too young to be immunized, but if the adults she came in contact with had been, she would have benefited from herd immunity, and would still be alive ( Read more... )

This is a fascinating podcast about the mental life of bacteria. It's like someone took my ideas on cognition and got a whole bunch of PhDs in microbiology to agree with me.

It came up in conversation today, and I found it absolutely fascinating. The topic was cosmology, and a theory that our neighborhood is an unusually sparse section of space. Interesting in itself, but this veered off into higher dimensions of spacetime ( Read more... )

When I first saw the "Corn Syrup isn't evil" ads, I was curious. I mean, the people who make high fructose corn syrup were telling me it was just like sugar- what motivation could they have to lie ( Read more... )

This may very well be the most awesome book ever. Too much awesome for the printed page, I think.


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Yet another study shows some evidence of a biological basis for homosexuality. On one hand, this is obvious. Human beings are constrained by their biology, and so everything done by a human is based in our biology ( Read more... )

There are still people living in iron lungs. How bizarre is that? I'm just stunned by how devastating polio really was. Armies of people kept alive in iron lungs because their body was too paralyzed to breathe ( Read more... )

Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone--a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive. ... Eating on the street--even when undertaken, say, because one is between appointments and has no ( Read more... )

Ms. Venkatesan lectured in freshman composition, intended to introduce undergraduates to the rigors of expository argument. "My students were very bully-ish, very aggressive, and very disrespectful," she told Tyler Brace of the Dartmouth Review. "They'd argue with your ideas." This caused "subversiveness," a principle English professors usually ( Read more... )

I refer you to Minna's post about the Bodies exhibit and the new music we found. The exhibit was amazing- if it ever comes to an area near you, check it out.

On the music- Bill Holt's Dreamies- this is the first album I've purchased from iTunes in a long time. For awhile, I was using the now-deceased and pseudo-legal Allofmp3.com. It wasn't so ( Read more... )