Discover, October 15, 2008

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Darwin would have loved Botox.

I don’t mean that he would have been first in line at the doctor’s office to get a needle jabbed into his famously furrowed brow. I mean that Darwin would have loved to use Botox as a scientific tool—to eavesdrop on the intimate conversation between the face and brain.

For much of his life, Darwin was ob­sessed with faces. On a visit to the London Zoo, he gave mirrors to a pair of orangutans and watched them grimace and pucker their lips as they stared at their reflections. He passed many an afternoon gazing intently at photographs of crying babies and laughing women.

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Conservation Magazine, September 26, 2008

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Every science has its icon. Genetics has the double helix of DNA. Particle physics has the spiraling tracks of electrons and protons. And if you had to sum up modern ecology in a single picture, it would be the dense mesh of arrows and circles that represents the food web.

The food web’s structure helps ecologists unravel how ecosystems function–whether species go through wild population swings or stay relatively stable. On the Serengeti, for example, acacia trees and grasses form the base of the web, with arrows rising to plant-eaters such as grasshoppers, mice, and gazelle. Each herbivore is in turn eaten by its own set of predators. You don’t have to be an ecologist to recognize the lion’s place in the food web. It’s the king of the jungle, the top predator.

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The New York Times, September 9, 2008

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Discover, September 8, 2008

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If you had to sum up the past 40 years of research on the mind, you could do worse than to call it the Rise of the Zombies.

We like to see ourselves as being completely conscious of our thought processes, of how we feel, of the decisions we make and our reasons for making them. When we act, it is our conscious selves doing the acting. But starting in the late 1960s, psychologists and neurologists began to find evidence that our self-aware part is not always in charge. Researchers discovered that we are deeply influenced by perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and desires about which we have no awareness. Their research raised the disturbing possibility that much of what we think and do is thought and done by an unconscious part of the brain—an inner zombie.

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The New York Times, September 8, 2008

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