Browsing: Veronique Greenwood

Headlines and apocalyptic notions about designer babies proliferated last month after Chinese scientists published the results of a curious set of experiments on human embryos. The researchers were looking to understand whether gene-editing technology could correct, before birth, a malformed gene that can cause a potentially devastating blood disease. They found that the method introduced new […]

How Julian Jaynes’ famous 1970s theory is faring in the neuroscience age.

Even when applied to a highly reflective surface like aluminum foil, Vantablack renders the entire surface, including creases, all but invisible.Surrey Nanosystems via Wikipedia Color is such a powerful and evocative sensation—one of the first that we learn to describe as children—that we don’t often think about what it really is. In a sense, color […]

Spider webs are veritable antennas humming with signals.

This engraving of a gray squirrel was included in the December 1841 issue of Robert Merry’s Museum. One day in 1856, hundreds of people gathered to gawk at an “unusual visitor” up a tree near New York’s City Hall. The occupant of the tree, according to a contemporary newspaper account, was an escaped pet squirrel, […]

This image from a mouse brain shows the fluid channels (purple) and glia cells (green) flush out the brain’s waste into blood vessels.Jeffrey Iliff1 and Maiken Nedergaard For humans, sleep is an absolute requirement for survival, almost on par with food and water. When we don’t get it, we not only feel terrible, but our […]

Light snow on Mt. Jumbo highlights the different shorelines of prehistoric Lake Missoula.Photo by Don Hyndman, courtesy of the University of Montana You may not realize it, but all around you lie coded messages about the past. The curve of a hill, the shape of a lake, or the almost dinosaurian spine of that ridge […]

Some cancer therapies focus the attention of the immune system like a spotlight over Hollywood.Everett Collection / Shutterstock In early May, 1891, William Coley, a New York surgeon, had before him an interesting case. The patient, a 35-year-old Italian man, had sarcoma tumors in his neck and tonsils, and was slowly starving to death as […]

When talking about our health, we tend to refer breezily to “the immune system,” as if it were as simple as an electric fence keeping out invaders. And there’s certainly an electric fence component: The innate immune response is an ancient, relatively nonspecific kind of defense that triggers inflammation and the deployment of attack cells […]