Archive: Mar 2014

The bony human skeleton needs little introduction: it holds our shape and allows us to go through our motions and activities. Though the importance of the human skeleton is clear, what may be surprising is that bacteria—tiny organisms visible only with a…

Pulsars have been nicknamed “cosmic lighthouses” after the narrow beams of radio light they sweep through space. For astronomers, one newly-discovered pulsar is casting light on an unexplored and mysterious region of the cosmic “ocean”: the immediate…

Ever thought about keeping a wolf? Probably not… To understand how wolves evolved into modern dogs and started living with humans, researchers wanted to find out exactly where and when this happened. Using many samples from prehistoric and modern dogs…

“The Future of Brain Implants”, psychologist Gary Marcus and neuroscientist Christof Koch took one step further, unfolding a future where a chip can be implanted into healthy brains to achieve superpower. Although there are still technical hurdles and…

This is a painting of my favorite statue by Louis-Ernest Barrias in Musée d’Orsay, Paris. As the title suggests, the beauty of nature is the inspiration for both art and science. I painted it with a drawing pad (WACOM’s Bamboo) attached to my…

7 feet of information. Stored in the nucleus. For this sciku.   Fast forward along DNA until reaching the stop codon.   Synthetic DNA. The blueprint of life. What is natural? A Sciku is a scientific snack, a short piece of science-related poetry served…

This project originated at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when sociologist of science Gerhard Sonnert met the blind astronomer Wanda Diaz Merced, who studied the sonification of astronomic data as a tool for data analysis and signal…

We may know that the universe began with a Big Bang, but until yesterday, we had no direct evidence for the drastic expansion the universe is thought to have undergone in the moments after its birth. This “inflationary” model has grown from a speculation…

 Food allergies are a growing problem around the world []. These days, if you do not personally suffer from an allergy, you almost certainly know someone who does. Currently, around 3-7% of children have a food allergy—about a 50% increase since 1997 [1,…

One of my earliest memories is of the chaos caused by a kamikaze bee that flew through an open window in my family’s pickup truck during an otherwise pleasant country drive. It saddens me to imagine a future where children are deprived of the bee-related…