Issue_50
25 articles-
The Typewriter’s Love of the Desert
Reflections on Sam Shepard’s time at the Santa Fe Institute I was first introduced to Sam by our mutual friend Valerie Plame Wilson. Sam had played Valerie’s father in the cinematic adaptation of her book, Fair Game. On the phone inviting Sam to SFI his first question to me was whether there would be sufficient desk […] -
The $1 Billion Misunderstanding of Aging
Robert Conquest, a historian of Soviet Russia and a poet, once summarized Shakespeare’s 28-line poem, “The Seven Ages of Man,” in five lines. They go like this:Seven Ages: first puking and mewling Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Then very pissed off with your schooling.Then fucks and then fights. […] -
A New Explanation for One of the Strangest Occurrences in Nature—Ball Lightning
Explanations for how ball lightning is formed are even more diverse than its physical characteristics. Just a sampling of the theories out there suggest the ball is a cloud of hot silicon particles, a natural nuclear reaction, a lightning-induced epileptic hallucination, a miniature black hole, an aggregate of cellulose and other natural polymers, and a […] -
Make Concrete Roman Again!
The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder can be charmingly self-deprecating. He attempted, in the 1st century A.D., to curate all ancient knowledge in his Natural History, yet he described its 37 volumes to his close friend’s son, Titus, the Emperor of Rome, as having “such inferior importance.” To Pliny, they did “not admit of the […] -
How to Defuse Offensive Speech
The claim that speech can be violence is dangerous, it is argued, because it exacerbates the emotional vulnerability that’s already rampant in the “Internet generation,” of which today’s undergraduates are a part.Image by Eduard Bezembinder / Flickr If you Google “It’s been emotional,” even without quotes, you’ll find that a clip from Guy Ritchie’s 1998 […]
-
The Case for More Science and Philosophy Books for Children
If we, as a society, were serious about our children, then children’s education—especially for those beginning “the age of reason”—would be our highest priority.Photograph by Sharon Mollerus / Flickr During my career as a scientist and a philosopher I have written and edited, thus far, 14 books. Of these, seven are for the general public. […]
-
Claude Shannon, the Las Vegas Shark
The father of information theory built a machine to game roulette, then abandoned it.
-
This Man’s Immune System Got a Cancer-Killing Update
William Ludwig was a 64-year-old retired corrections officer living in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in 2010, when he received a near-hopeless cancer prognosis. The Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania had run out of chemotherapeutic options, and Ludwig was disqualified from most clinical trials since he had three cancers at once—leukemia, lymphoma, and squamous […]
-
How to Hear Like a Champion Birder
Take a walk with the man building a Shazam for birds. -
The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks
Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure. -
How I Coaxed a Western Medicine Skeptic to Get a Biopsy
Calculated humility in a physician may be the difference between life and death.Photograph by Tonhom1009 / Shutterstock Although I have lived the majority of my life in New Jersey, Utah has always felt like home. Three of my grandparents were multigenerational Utahns, of pioneer stock, and the other grandparent grew up in nearby Idaho. Our […] -
Why Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Refuses to Die
If you want to investigate what could attack the Red Spot and make it disappear, you not only have to worry about what’s attacking the kinetic energy, like friction; you also have to worry about something that turns out to be more important—what’s attacking the potential energy. There’s a well-known reason why the potential energy […] -
I Built a Stable Planetary System with 416 Planets in the Habitable Zone
This system is completely stable—I double-checked with computer simulations. But nature would have a tough time forming this system. If it exists, it could only have been built by a super-advanced civilization.Image by Sean Raymond / planetplanet.net When Frank Drake was a boy, growing up in 1930s Chicago, his parents, observant Baptists, enrolled him in […]
