The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab)
In dust one can record the actions of storms, the wearing of mountains, the consequences of industrialization. The study of dust has a long history. [...]
In dust one can record the actions of storms, the wearing of mountains, the consequences of industrialization. The study of dust has a long history. [...]
In The Man Who Touched His Own Heart I tell the story of the artist Leonardo da Vinci’s discoveries inside bodies. Among the most astonishing of [...]
My grandfather was concerned with a relatively small number of things in the last years of his life; one of those things was the dark [...]
Hundreds of self-experiments, tens of thousands of worms In 1976, Jonathan Turton, a British parasitologist was suffering from allergies. Most of the time scientists suffer [...]
Recently, Pernille Hjort from the Danish Museum of Natural History visited us in Raleigh to exchange ideas about new projects in public science. It was an [...]
Some people go from early life to death focused on one mystery. This approach, I am told, can be very satisfying. One of my mentors, [...]
I was staying in a one, room shack beside a river. The river, a majestic river, reminded me of the sound of a washing machine. My [...]
Recently, one of my colleagues, Brian Brown, found thirty new species of flies in urban Los Angeles. Species not yet named. Species not yet studied. [...]
Mary Claire King, as much as any individual scholar, has changed how we think about what it means to be human. She did so using [...]
The amazing thing about trees is that they start as seeds. Some small enough for ants to carry. Others that ride in the guts of [...]
The single easiest way to increase the number of heartbeats you can expect to experience in your life is to move. Geography is a far better [...]
Some discoveries and innovations come from big labs funded incredibly well by governments in affluent countries. They come from those in the mainstream, freighters plowing [...]
New analyses of chimpanzees and humans reveal them to be far more different than suspected, perhaps as much as 95% different. Sometimes it takes time [...]
Some parts of science are boring. Some are tedious. Some seem as though they will never end. It is these parts of science we tend [...]
and other stories of the biogeography of pathogens Among the greatest of the unwinnable debates among academics is the place of humans in nature. It [...]