Allow me to direct your attention to three stories of mine that have come out in the past few days:
1. In Popular Mechanics, I take a look at the convergence of the old and the new. Paleontologists are using the latest laser-scanning technology and 3D-printing devices to visualize and replicate fossils. When you are faced with a graveyard of forty fossil whales, this kind of thing is a really big help.
2. In 1918, a third of people came down with a new kind of flu that killed 50 million people. It was the worst pandemic of the past century by far. What was so awful about it? For my latest “Matter” column for the New York Times I look at a provocative new explanation: maybe it was mostly a matter of bad timing.
3. Is there something in the blood of the young that can reverse aging in the elderly? An eerie new set of experiments adds more evidence in favor of the answer being yes. I have the details in today’s New York Times. Already on Twitter and Facebook, people have offered up references to vampires, Keith Richards, Elizabeth Bathory,Flowers for Algernon, and Methuselah’s Children. I guess it’s just one of those stories that hits a very big cultural nerve.