I don’t consider myself particularly creative, so I certainly admire creativity in others. But I know the creative process can be long and evolutionary. I guess this is why a post entitled “Snoopy at 65” on Facebook caught my eye. This beloved cartoon dog’s origin can be traced back to a sketch about a pup who
How would things be different if women ran the world? I hesitate to speculate about humans, but there is one primate species where females do run things — lemurs. After roughly 55 million years of evolution, most lemur species have females in charge. The June, 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine (in the “Basic Instincts”
There was a fascinating program today on NPR’s “Fresh Air”. http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/ The guest was Anil Ananthaswamy, author of the book The Man Who Wasn’t There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self, which covers topics like Cotard’s syndrome, a very rare mental disorder in which the sufferer is convinced he or she
We take so much for granted in the world. Like why we scream. I hadn’t given this a thought until I saw this discussed in a Time magazine news brief. Time reported on new research in the journal Current Biology that suggests hearing a scream may activate the brain’s fear circuitry. Normally, your brain takes
I just got back from a week in sunny Southern California (although it did rain for a day). I was catching up reading my National Geographic magazines (they’re a good size for airplane trips) and I ran across this in the July 2015 issue — A 2014 study led by University of Melbourne ecologists showed
Al Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford, and he was co-winner (with Lloyd Shapley) of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. An engineer by training, he became an expert on designing markets because in certain situations, money alone can’t solve some problems. For example, Stanford University doesn’t use supply and demand to
I was out shopping Saturday night and I heard a cashier marvel about receiving a $100 bill. Is that the largest bill in circulation? That piqued my curiosity, and I got on my smart phone. According to the official website of the U.S. Department of the Treasury (http://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages/denominations.aspx), the denominations of currency now in production are
Mention the steam engine, and most people think of James Watt. Actually, the steam engine goes back to the 1st century AD — the earliest known design, the aeolipile, was described by the Greek mathematician and engineer Hero of Alexandria, as recorded in his manuscript Spiritalia seu Pneumatica. On July 2, 1698, British engineer Thomas Savery was
From The Writer’s Almanac, June 23, 2015: “The typewriter was patented on this date in 1868, by Christopher Latham Sholes of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Sholes was a newspaperman, and he was driven to invention out of necessity: His printers went on strike. He and two colleagues set out to invent a machine to print letters on
We as a species don’t like mysteries. We’re always trying to explain what we see, even when we don’t have enough information to understand. For example, have you ever seen an elephant skull? An elephant doesn’t have a bone between its eyes; there’s just one huge hole in the upper middle of the skull where