WIRED, April 3, 2008

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It’s easy to be over-dazzled by the brain. Who could be unimpressed by the billions of neurons packed into our skulls, linked together by trillions of connections, capable of encoding memories from decades ago, of playing a saxophone, of sending space probes out of our solar system? We naturally want to know how our brain got to be so good. But there’s an even more interesting question worth asking: How do we manage to survive with a brain that’s so bad?

The job of the brain is to make decisions. It takes in information from its senses, which it then processes in a vast network of neuron circuits, finally producing some kind of output.

Continue reading “Your Brain Is a Mess, but It Knows How to Make Fixes” →

WIRED, March 21, 2008

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We like to tell ourselves that it’s easy to distinguish between the natural and the artificial, but they have a knack for fooling us. When European colonists traveled through the patchwork of forests and meadows of New England, they thought they were exploring primeval nature. In fact, Native Americans had been tending it carefully with fires for centuries. When the Viking probe snapped a fuzzy picture of a mountain on Mars in 1976, some people were sure it showed a giant face carved by Martians. When another probe took a sharper picture in 2001, all trace of the face had vanished.

Continue reading “Distinguishing Artificial From Natural Is Possible, for Now” →

Slate, March 19, 2008

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An outbreak of E. coli isn’t usually the stuff of feel-good stories. Feel-bad is more like it–or even feel-organ-failure. But recent E. coli outbreaks can offer us a bit of solace. We live in the anxious age of synthetic biology, when scientists can reconstruct entire genomes from raw chemicals, and when we all fret that someone is going to use this new technology to create a monster bug and unleash a man-made plague. According to one government report, “The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease known to man.” But a close look at recent outbreaks of E. coli–and a closer look at the bacteria themselves–may help us to put aside our fears for the moment. Engineering plagues is harder than it looks.

Continue reading “Spinach, Lettuce, and the Limits of Bioterrorism” →

WIRED, March 6, 2008

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The Grand Canyon is a victim of terrible press.

Its banded walls make up one of the most magnificent landscapes on Earth. And yet it seems the only time reporters bother to mention its geology is when they are writing about creationists and their bogus claims that the Grand Canyon formed a few thousand years ago. It’s a shame, because the real story of the Grand Canyon is a riveting epic. Even its scientific history is fascinating: Figuring out just how old the Grand Canyon is has challenged geologists for 150 years. And just this week, the mystery may be solved.

Continue reading “How to Date the Grand Canyon: Go With the Flow” →

The New York Times, March 4, 2008

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