Browsing: Lens_biology

Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, dreamt about peering into minds. “A series of distorting prisms block the knowing of the other,” he wrote in Love’s Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, in 2012. “Perhaps in some millennium, such union will come to pass—the ultimate antidote for isolation, the ultimate scourge […]

Treating my cat for depression caused me to question the state of anxiety in animals and us.

How biological invaders challenge our idea of self and other.

When 12 men gathered at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia to discuss the art and science of alien hunting in 1961, the Order of the Dolphin was born. A number of the brightest minds from a range of scientific disciplines, including three Nobel laureates, a young Carl Sagan, and an eccentric neuroscientist named […]

Jill Viles, an Iowa mother, was born with a rare type of muscular dystrophy. The symptoms weren’t really noticeable until preschool, when she began to fall while walking. She saw doctors, but they couldn’t diagnose her or supply a remedy. When she left for college, she was 5-foot-3 and weighed just 87 pounds. How she […]

Gregor Hintler had what seemed like a simple question: How many trees are there? As part of Plant for the Planet, a youth initiative that aimed to plant one billion trees in every country by 2020, he needed a way to figure out how many trees the planet could fit. But when he tried to […]

Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development.

One April day in 2013, the submersible Shinkai 6500 descended to the base of the steep São Paulo Ridge, 13,000 feet under the Atlantic Ocean. “Hang on,” Paulo Sumida, a marine biologist, radioed to the submersible pilot from the support vessel on the ocean’s surface. “Those are whale bones.” In fact, they were frozen vertebrae of […]

With three times as many neurons, why doesn’t the elephant brain outperform ours?

Milton Wainwright believes he’s seen ET. In Earth’s upper atmosphere, he claims to have found evidence for panspermia—the hypothesis that life travels through the cosmos via meteoroids and other objects. A microbiologist and astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield, Wainwright sends large balloons up to the stratosphere, as high as 25 miles above the planet’s […]