In 2008, my 19-year-old daughter, Danielle, took the same type of DNA test for breast and ovarian cancer that actress Angelina Jolie took recently.Jolie, 38, came out positive and…

Take a look at a butterfly’s wing, and you can learn a lesson about life. Not that it’s beautiful, or fragile, or too easily appreciated only when it’s fading—though all that…

When looking at the “Nutrition Facts” label on a package of food, the familiar Helvetica text laid out according to the FDA’s exacting specifications, you could easily…

It’s easy to think of our cells’ inner workings as parts in a well-oiled machine—like tiny crankshafts and gears they chug along in their endless task of transcribing information…

When President Obama delivered a speech at MIT in 2009, he used a common science metaphor: “We have always been about innovation,” he said. “We have always been about discovery.…

It has recently become clear that each one of us is more microbe than human—at least when it comes to the number of cells in our bodies. The bacteria that swarm through our guts,…

Gary Marcus can’t understand why people are shocked when he calls the brain a computer. The 43-year-old professor of psychology at New York University, author of Kluge, about the…

Our noses are incredible things. Most of us can distinguish around 10,000 different smells—but like many kinds of human experience, we each smell those smells somewhat differently.…

If an intelligent alien species landed on the small bit of galactic rock that we call home, they might get out of their spaceships, have a look around, and decide that we—that is,…

When the cicadas of Brood II burst into open air—and into song—later this month, after living 17 years in darkness below ground, they will have one thing on their collective, eerily…