My mother, on whom I depend for all my New Jersey history, passed on a delightful tale of George Washington, Tom Paine, and their passion for chemistry experiments. In early November 1783, Tom Paine paid a visit to George Washington in Rockingham, New Jersey, where Washington was waiting for news of the end of the revolutionary war. One night Paine and Washington got to talking with two colonels about the will-o-the-wisp, the fiery globe that people sometimes claimed to see floating over marshes.

They came up with two plausible hypotheses. The colonels thought that they were produced from some kind of matter in the marches, such as turpentine. Washington and Paine thought it was a gas.

Continue reading “Science and Politics: The Tale of George Washington’s Swamp Gas” →

One of Darwin’s lesser known obsessions was with faces–how we make different faces, and what they say about us. Today, psychologists and neuroscientists are discovering the hidden conversation between brain and face, with a lot of tools Darwin never had–MRI scanners, subcutaneous electrodes, and Botox.

Botox?

Indeed. In fact, some recent studies with Botox raise the weird possibility that our national love affair with that face-freezing drug may be subtly altering the emotions of millions of people.

Continue reading “Darwin, Botox, and The Brain’s Outer Edge” →

[10/16/08 Correction appended: see end of post]

When our ancestors moved ashore some 360 million years ago, they underwent a lot of changes as they evolved from ocean-swimming fish to land-walking tetrapods. For one thing, they needed feet instead of fins. Paleontologists have discovered a series of fossils that document the early evolution of limb bones in our aquatic ancestors, showing how long bones first evolved, then parts of the wrist and digit-like bones, and finally full-blown feet.

Continue reading “The Shoulder Bone’s Connected to the Ear Bone…” →