Pierre Bienaimé
Where “The Walking Dead” Goes Wrong With Zombies
Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a cop—and sinks it […]
What If Only Females Could See Color?
Have you ever wondered how your life might be different if you could see beyond the visible light spectrum—into ultraviolet or infrared? For one thing, you might be immune, or less susceptible, to implicit racial bias. Inna Vishik, an applied physicist at U.C. Davis, says if you weren’t limited to the typical range of colors […]
DJs Are Dropping Beats From Deep Space
Interpreting something from the universe awakens a unique inspiration and curiosity,” says the Swiss electronic musician Lucien Nicolet, who goes by Luciano. He wasn’t waxing mystical. That awakening lead to ALMA Sounds, his latest album, released this month, which features audio derived from one of the world’s biggest astronomy telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array […]
Here’s Where “The Walking Dead” Goes Wrong With Zombies
Bill Clark/Getty Images Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a […]
The Word “Million” Didn’t Exist Until We Needed It
I would cut off my right hand if you find it.” That was the guarantee retired Columbia history lecturer Jens Ulff-Møller made that there was no word for “million” in Old English, a medieval predecessor of the language you’re currently reading. Some Anglo-Saxon writers understood the idea of a million, and they had a term for it: a “thousand […]
