Browsing: Lens_biology

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, across our skin, and in every orifice you have outnumber our human cells by at least 10 to 1, though their […]

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 haphazard evolution of the brain, and a leading researcher in how children acquire language, grins and says it’s a generational thing. “I know there’s a philosophical school of […]

The variability in how people smell has a lot to do with their genetics.

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, our species—are the master builders on our planet. There would be plenty of reasons to think so. We build bridges spanning enormous […]

Personal DNA testing may yet deliver on its promise.

Hope your week went well. It might have changed your genetics.

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 synchronized mind: sex. Though millions of humans inhabiting the mid-Atlantic states will soon hear the insects’ incredible racket, they’re probably unaware that what they’re […]

What a waste are two thumbs on the space bar. There they sit, nearly flaccid, punctuating the end of each word, awaiting the call to crack stone or to use sharp flakes to incise wood. It is easy to think of other traits as making us human. We talk, use metaphors, empathize, follow fashions, laugh, play […]

I recently discovered that my 10-times-great-grandfather bought a good chunk of Brooklyn from the Lenape Indians. He was one of the first Dutch landowners on this continent, a man who had run a laundry bleaching business in Holland but had traveled under the auspices of the Dutch West India Company to become a farmer in […]