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Requiem for the Redhead
The next great extinction—Carrot Tops
February 2009 |
By Patricia McNamee Rosenberg
Lincoln vs. Darwin (Part 3 of 4)
Last week we asked: Who was more important, Abraham Lincoln or Charles Darwin? T.A. Frail took up the fight for Lincoln, and Laura Helmuth argued for Darwin. Today, senior editor Mark Strauss, the grand organizer of all of our recent Lincoln coverage in the magazine, takes the helm.Please add your ...
January 26, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
How Many Ugandan Mountain Gorillas?
Mountain gorillas are rare and endangered, and they have the misfortune to live in a part of the world wracked by human violence. In the magazine in 2007, we focused on the gorillas of Congo and Rwanda, giving little attention to the 350 living in neighboring Uganda. But the Ugandan gorillas may no...
January 22, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
This is Your Brain…In Cake
I’ve been waiting for Cake Wrecks to feature something science-y, and I’m not disappointed in Thursday’s post, They Think They’re Organic , which features a brain, a kidney, a heart and an entire digestive tract, all made out of cake. (Much more impressive than the dinosaur cakes.)The brain, as you...
January 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Why Golfers Might Need Earplugs
The golf course would seem to be a quiet and peaceful place, so why did an audiologist recommend that some golfers wear earplugs?A new report in the British Medical Journal from a group of doctors in England claims that the new generation of thin-faced titanium drivers create such a loud noise--up ...
January 06, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
The Language of Drunkenness
How often do you get drunk? Intoxicated? Inebriated? Tanked? Hammered? Wasted? Plastered? Sloshed? Tipsy? Buzzed?Does your answer change depending on the word I use? And if I asked you to define each term, would your definitions be the same as mine?In daily life, these nuances of language don’t rea...
December 16, 2008 |
By Sarah Zielinski
R.I.P., H.M., Memory's Most Famous Initials
The most famous non-name in psychology died this week. The man was identified in scientific papers and Psych 101 textbooks by his initials only: H.M.H.M. had a rare and strange experience of the world: he could form no new memories after 1953. He had mostly normal memories of whatever happened befo...
December 05, 2008 |
By Laura Helmuth
Facial Expressions Electrified
Dick Conniff is a frequent contributor to Smithsonian magazine (see his story in the June issue about the productive rivalry between Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace) who writes the "Strange Behaviors" blog.Yesterday he posted a video from an artist who... well, you just have to see it, and...
December 04, 2008 |
By Laura Helmuth
Get to Sleep Before You Lose Your Senses and Your Money!
Here's one more thing to worry about when you're lying awake at 4:00 a.m.:If you don't get back to sleep, you risk forgetting whatever it was you learned yesterday, impairing your ability to learn new things tomorrow, and preventing yourself from extracting general concepts from a set of examples. ...
November 19, 2008 |
By Laura Helmuth
Accents Are Forever
By their first birthday, babies are getting locked into the sounds of the language they hear spoken
January 2001 |
By Edwin Kiester, Jr.
