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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Discover, April 24, 2011

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One day not long ago a 27-year-old woman was brought to the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, sleepy and confused. Fani Andelman, a neuropsychologist at the center, and colleagues gave the woman a battery of psychological tests to judge her state of mind. At first the woman seemed fine. She could see and speak clearly. She could understand the meaning of words and recall the faces of famous people. She could even solve logic puzzles, including a complex test that required her to plan several steps ahead. But her memory had holes. She could still remember recent events outside her own life, and she could tell Andelman details of her life up to 2004. Beyond that point, however, her autobiography was in tatters.

Continue reading “Memories Are Crucial for Looking Into the Future” →

The Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2011

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The bottom of a mine shaft doesn’t seem like the sort of place a naturalist should go to look for life. But scientists have found thriving communities of microbes living as deep as two miles underground. These organisms can’t rely on sunlight for their energy, so they survive instead on the radioactivity of the rocks in which they dwell. They exist in a world separate from our own, an ecological Hades.