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As Arthur Conan Doyle said, “it is easy to be wise, after the event”. When it comes to infectious diseases, decisions about how to manage and contain them have been traditionally informed by prior experience…
It’s that time of year again - the end of daylight savings and the beginning of the dark season. While many of us look forward to seasonal festivities, millions can also expect feelings of depression…
My brief experience in a casino was pretty typical, I’d say. Flashing lights. The faint smell of booze. Not much chatter among patrons. The sounds of dice rolling, machines buzzing, and coins clanking…
Industrial civilization must become technologically, economically, politically, and morally sustainable to hold the earth’s temperature below 2°C (3.6°F) higher than its preindustrial average. The problem…
If you’ve ever applied for a job, you know how hard it is to write the perfect cover letter that will make you stand out above all the other applicants. It’s a competitive job market, and more often than…
Ah, football. The great American pastime. The freshly cut grass and crisply-painted yard lines. The sound of helmets clashing in an epic stack of large men vying for a single ball. Stands packed high with…
I live in the city of Hershey, otherwise known as “the sweetest place on Earth” (registered trademark). I’m surrounded by references to chocolate everyday – from the smell of it in the air to Kiss-shaped…
Many people believe that what was found in Liang Bua Cave on the island of Flores in Indonesia in 2003-2004 was some variety of hobbit-like human or prehuman. Our research published today argues that it…
It’s a common conversation starter to assert that we only use 10% of our brains. In Lucy, the soon-to-be-released thriller about a woman forced to work as a drug mule for the Taiwanese mob, Professor Norman…
The National Sleep Foundation has done a great job terrifying citizens since the 1990s with its annual Sleep in America poll results. In 2005, 60% of adult drivers in the US reported that they’d driven…
Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard, but Harry had always been small and skinny for his age … [he] had a thin face, knobbly knees … and wore round glasses held together with a…
When last we saw our fearless antihero, Don Draper, he was standing face-to-face with his crumbling, dilapidated childhood home. Surprisingly, his three children were by his side as he took these first…
Never before have we been such compulsive multitaskers, blogging and tweeting using multiple devices and smartphones anywhere and everywhere, from trains to cafes. It seems a little backwards, then, that…
Many theories have been proposed for the evolution of dark skin pigmentation – and a new paper revives one of the oldest: that skin cancer was a more potent selective force for the evolution of protective…
This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of John, Paul, George, and Ringo’s debut appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show in the US. But what was it about? Was it the moptop haircuts, Cuban heels, and “yeah yeah…
I’m not old by any means, but I’ve become a little more forgetful lately. This morning I poured myself a thermos of coffee and left for lab, abandoning it on the kitchen counter. I nearly forgot about…
Europeans fall prey to skin cancer because of their lighter skin, while Africans’ dark skin protects them. But East Asians, whose skin colour resembles that of Europeans, are similar to Africans in their…
The frequency of large wildfires in the western US have been increasing over the past several decades. The Rim Fire, currently threatening the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite National Park, is an example…
Since the 2004 Sumatra earthquake, there have been several major events, and a large number of magnitude-8 earthquakes – a cluster, it could be said, of large earthquakes. The last time we saw this was…