The Unseen
14 articles-
A Short History of the Missing Universe
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.The cosmos plays hide-and-seek. Sometimes, though, even when astronomers have a hunch for where their prey might hide, it can take them decades of searching to confirm it. The case of the universe’s missing matter—a case that appears to now be closed, as I reported earlier this month—is one such instance. To […]
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How Doctors Use Poetry
A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and heal.
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Why Did the Ancients Bury Their Dogs like Family Members?
Man’s best friend was also man’s first buried pet.Photograph by Pavlina Trauskeova / Shutterstock As a kid, when my pet turtle died we had a funeral—of course—and buried him in the backyard. When the family dog passed, his remains were cremated and placed in an urn on the mantle. In today’s society, mortuary rites for […]
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The Heart of Musical Experience Is Expectation
In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano into a patient’s room. It’s a delightful moment: The patient is a musical savant named Patrick, played by the musician Dave Matthews—a painful muscle contraction in his hand, suffered during a performance, brought him in. […]
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Fine Tuning Is Just Fine
Why it’s not such a problem that the Large Hadron Collider hasn’t found new physics.
