A New Halloween Monster
Ghosts, skeletons, mummies, witches. Oh, and spiders, of course — all Halloween staples, and the stuff of nightmares. But spiders have their own nightmares....
Am I boring you?
Warning: You might yawn while reading this. Yawning is famously contagious; just talking or even thinking about yawning can prompt a yawn in response....
Your Guess Is As Good As Mine
[I’ve had a chaotic schedule the past few days, so I’m sending a rerun this week. When I pulled this one out of the archives, I thought “Oh how I wish AI had...
Please Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
AI may be out to kill us, but killer whales probably aren’t. In the past, I’ve written about Iberian orcas ramming yachts off the coasts of Portugal and...
You May Owe Your Existence to Poop
Roughly 500 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, life on Earth went from a few simple life forms to a truly astonishing variety of complex...
Clue: Stranger Than Fiction (15 letters, five words, begins with Y)
If cryptic crosswords, also known as British crosswords, have ever made you feel dumb (I was relieved to learn they make a lot of British people feel dumb,...
Keep an eye on your paperclips
You’ve probably heard that an AI model “broke out” last week and hacked into another company’s AI (actually, according to the latest reporting, it got into...
Singing Mice, Chattering Humans
Last week I was chatting with a source for a story on gene editing. He happened to be on a Greek Island, which I found very distracting. It was a Zoom...
I really don’t know clouds at all
I was rather proud of myself when (at an older age than I’m willing to reveal) I discovered that clouds aren’t actually giant bags of water floating in the...
The Nicest Person Ever?
Alfred Russel Wallace may well have been the nicest person ever to have lived. Ok, that’s an exaggeration, but maybe not by much. Wallace was a great...
A New Vital Sign?
Your doctor knows what your blood pressure and heart rate should be. They know what your glucose should be. They know how many hours you should sleep at...
The Bright Side of Life
Everything is going to be OK. Or maybe not. But it might be safest to think so. According to an article in the Washington Post last week, there’s a growing...
Separated at Death
This week is a rerun of an old favorite. I apologize, but life happens, and it happened to me this week. I’ll be back with something fresh in two weeks!...
What Makes Chocolate So Luscious? You Might be Surprised
I’ve been campaigning for decades to convince people that not all microbes are bad. Some are quite wonderful. The best arguments for this are a few of my...
Swamp Magic
I have a new article out in Science News Explores, and I’m very excited about it. It’s about the Okefenokee swamp. The thing is, I like swamps. I like the...
Thumbs up!
Ok. I have two things for you today that you may not know. I certainly didn’t. First, rodents are the most common mammal on the planet. Forty percent of all...
Is it something about the language?
Aliens are real. At least that’s what former President Obama said last week. Of course, he later explained that what he meant was that the math favors...
Talk listen to the animals
Over the years, I’ve written a lot about the animal language experiments that were done back in the 60s and 70s. I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of...
Something Soothing
I’m just getting over a bout with the flu (and to keep with that boxing metaphor, it totally KO’d me). Actually I don’t know that it was flu. I was way too...
Hang on, hang on — I’ll get around to it
I’ve never thought of myself as a procrastinator. I get my assignments in on time, often ahead of time, and I generally get started early enough that I don’t...