Discover, June 15, 2012

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I dig a knife into a cardboard box, slit it open, and lift a plastic bottle of bright red fluid from inside. I set it down on my kitchen table, next to my coffee and eggs. The drink, called NeuroSonic, is labeled with a cartoon silhouette of a head, with a red circle where its brain should be. A jagged line—presumably the trace of an EKG—crosses the circle. And down at the very bottom of the bottle, it reads, “Mental performance in every bottle.”

My office is full of similar boxes: Dream Water (“Dream Responsibly”), Brain Toniq (“The clean and intelligent think drink”), iChill (“helps you relax, reduce stress, sleep better”), and Nawgan (“What to Drink When You Want to Think”).

Continue reading “Bottles Full of Brain-Boosters” →

The New York Times, June 4, 2012

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National Geographic, May 31, 2012

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The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to write, dig, remove tumors, pull a rabbit out of a hat. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we concoct would come to nothing but a very long to-do list.

The reason we can use our hands for so many things is their extraordinary anatomy. Underneath the skin, hands are an exquisite integration of tissues.

Continue reading “The Common Hand” →

World Science Festival, May 22, 2012

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Our brains are not the only places where we can store memories. Each time a new pathogen invades our bodies, our immune cells have an opportunity to recognize it by some feature, usually some distinctive cleft or spike of a protein on its surface. After our bodies defeat the infection, some immune cells are tasked with keeping the memory of that feature alive for years. If that same pathogen returns for a second attack, our bodies can launch a far faster counterattack.

We can tutor our immune systems with vaccines. Depending on the disease they protect against, vaccines may contain dead viruses, protein fragments, or some other substance derived from a pathogen.

Continue reading “Curing Our Influenza Amnesia” →