Over the ages our teeth and our tongue have become ever more crowded by the shrinking of the human jaw. Not only is this an aesthetic disaster, but it compromises our breathing, which…

Human skin books are the rare artifacts that prove that the practice of making leather goods from human skin is more than just a ghoulish legend.Photograph by voodoo willyIn 1868,…

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill. “Of man’s first disobedience…” In…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Decades ago, the noted computational neuroscientist David Marr observed that “trying to understand perception…

An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type 2 diabetes. What is surprising is that meropenem,…

Three of the rare Przewalski’s horses that now roam the area near the Chernobyl nuclear plant.Photograph by Sergey GaschakAfter a fatal series of errors and malfunctions in the early…

Far from being a symptom of linguistic indifference or moral decay, mumbling displays an underlying logic similar to the data-compression schemes that are used to create MP3s and JPEGs.Photograph…

A careful reading of Walden; or, Life in the Woods makes it clear that Thoreau never intended his cabin to be a solitary hermitage, although fans and detractors alike often misunderstand…

SETI Institute astronomer Laurance Doyle proposed using information theory to analyze animal communication systems, particularly the whistle repertoire of bottlenose dolphins.Illustration…

I arrived for my meeting with Professor Chambers at the pleasant Cardiff pub near his office where we’d agreed to have lunch. He was already sitting at the back of the room, and…