Among many things we will remember after the coronavirus pandemic, the world was quieter than normal. When I compared a busy avenue-street intersection in Manhattan before and during the lockdown, I found a 6 decibel (dB) difference, four-fold in amplitude.
A long time ago I made a discreet survey of male manes. Perhaps it was an idle way to cure boredom on journeys, but the more I looked the more convinced I became that men who turn gray when young
Two American fertility clinics reported freezers failing last month, and had thawed to an undisclosed degree. This rare event shocked hundreds of patients who were storing embryos, eggs and ovarian tissue. Maybe it was the equipment that failed or a
Predicting the future is fickle, as Stephen Hawking once observed: “it exists only as a spectrum of possibilities.” And, yet, divining the future is irresistible and physicists strive to forecast the future of stars, black holes and climate. Biologists are
Who would imagine that a salamander could offer clues for regenerating human limbs after amputation in an accident and on the battlefield, or even show how to thwart human cancer? Axolotls are the kind of weird creature you might expect
FROM SUN TO SHINING SEA Dr. Howard Jones passed away a year ago today in his 105th year. The following is extracted from the prologue I wrote for “Howard & Georgeanna” (2015) to remind us of our loss. Since pioneer days, very
Ashton Carter announced the Pentagon will make a bigger commitment to family-building for people serving in the military. The package includes new benefits for maternity leave and child care, and even a pilot scheme for egg and sperm freezing. The
That’s a problem for our banana-munching republic. Sex was suspended for banana cultivation long ago, and the price we will pay is a Bananageddon. Here’s why. The plant is propagated vegetatively and cannot produce seeds because it is genetically triploid.
It won’t be long before snp is added to the pantheon of approved English words in the OED. It will sit among those rarest of words, those that lack a vowel like the crafty Welsh invented—cwm (a mountain hollow), crwth
The back of a Cornflakes box is a good deal more absorbing than another person’s family tree. Genealogy is a rather personal game of history. Our interest seems to gain momentum with age, which may unfortunately mean we are too