Reading Time: 5 minutes To be a successful gardener, you have to think in years and seasons. Living at the pace of a plant is a welcome antidote to a culture built on convenience and instant gratification.
Biology
Posted inBooks
10 books for deep dives: A humanist summer reading list
Reading Time: 14 minutes As recently noted, OnlySky has entered into partnership with American Atheists. Some of us are taking a pause during the transition, but I’ll be right here with the team as we explore what comes next. (And I’m looking forward, alongside all of you, to seeing what that entails, so thank you to everyone who raised […]
Posted inScience
Alzheimer’s latest drug and science journalism’s memory problem
Reading Time: 6 minutes In July, the medical community was rocked by a disappointing reminder of science’s weakest link: the humans doing the work. The journal Science had shared that its six-month investigation supported the findings of whistleblower Matthew Schrag, who first noted altered images in a high-impact paper on Alzheimer’s, published in Nature in 2006. That paper is […]
Posted inBiology
The Svalbard seed vault: A survival bunker for civilization
Reading Time: 5 minutes How could we reengineer civilization to be resilient against catastrophe? A vault of seeds slumbering in Arctic permafrost suggests one way.
Posted inBiology
The startling world of plant intelligence
Reading Time: 5 minutes They don’t sense human emotion, but plants have some surprising talents. They can hear, see, learn, communicate and remember.
Posted inBiology
Let us all now praise caffeine
Reading Time: 6 minutes Caffeine is a psychoactive and addictive drug, even if we rarely think of it that way. Still, our lives would be poorer without it.
Posted inBiology
What do trees say to each other?
Reading Time: 5 minutes The more we look, the more intelligence we find in nature. Even trees are capable of communicating, sharing resources, and responding to their environment.
Posted inBiology
On brain cells, Pong, and a major problem with science journalism
Reading Time: 9 minutes Everything old is new again, in the world of mainstream reporting on scientific progress. That’s why you can be forgiven for déjà vu if you read this week about cells trained to interact in an environment mimicking the video game Pong. Wait a second, you might have told yourself: Didn’t we do this already? And […]
Posted inEvolution
Fish fossils aid the search for human origins
Reading Time: 2 minutes Perhaps the greatest question driving science—and human thought in general—is the mystery of origins. This question has manifested itself in myriad shapes and sizes: our fascination with the Big Bang, the birth of our Earth, the evolution of our own species, and even our own individual genealogies. Especially as many have turned away from religion—the […]
Posted inEvolution
Surprise! The Nobel goes to evolutionary sciences, not COVID research
Reading Time: 4 minutes Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo joined a rare group this morning: not just of Nobel Prize winners, but of “family Nobels”. His father, Karl Sune Detlof Bergström, shared the 1982 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine with Bengt I. Samuelsson and John R. Vane, for work related to local-tissue hormones, or “prostaglandins”. Forty years later, that award went solely […]