Discover, June 16, 2011

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For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional nuisance—a stubbed toe, a paper cut—but a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts.

Continue reading “A Tiny Key to a Terrible Lock” →

Newsweek, June 5, 2011

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When Philip Tarr heard the first reports of a massive outbreak of E. coli in Europe recently, they had a sickeningly familiar ring. Tarr, a microbiologist at Washington University, is an expert on the strains of E. coli that have periodically wreaked havoc in the United States. In 2006, for example, E. coli on contaminated spinach infected 199 people in the United States, causing kidney failure in a number of cases. The European outbreak seemed to fit the pattern: people were infected with E. coli apparently after eating contaminated vegetables.

Continue reading “E. Coli: Rise of the Superbacteria” →

Slate, May 27, 2011

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Cast your mind back six months, to late November 2010. Wikileaks had unveiled the first goodies from its cache of 250,000 State Department cable. Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party was coasting toward yet another easy win in Egyptian elections. And, for just a few days, a lot of us wondered if NASA had discovered aliens.

If you’ve forgotten about that otherworldly dalliance, today is a good time to refresh your memory. On Nov. 29, NASA announced that it would soon hold a press conference to “discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.”

Continue reading “The Discovery of Arsenic-Based Twitter” →

Discover, May 17, 2011

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In the 1940s, the Nobel prize–winning neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed some of the most important brain surgeries in the history of science. His patients were newts.

Sperry started by gently prying out newts’ eyes with a jeweler’s forceps. He rotated them 180 degrees and then pressed them back into their sockets. The newts had two days to recover before Sperry started the second half of the procedure. He sliced into the roof of each newt’s mouth and made a slit in the sheath surrounding the optic nerve, which relays signals from the eyes to the brain. He drew out the nerve, cut it in two, and tucked the two ragged ends back into their sheath.

Continue reading “The Brain Is Made of Its Own Architects” →

The New York Times, May 16, 2011

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