Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark: In the fall of 1983, Soviet lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov was monitoring his country’s nuclear warning systems when alarm bells suddenly started ringing. The screen in front of him flashed the word “LAUNCH.” The alerts signaled what appeared to be a terrifying reality: The United States had lobbed five intercontinental missiles straight…
Elizabeth Svoboda in Nature: In a laboratory in Israel, an incubator drum spins on a bench. The two glass bottles attached to the drum contain mouse embryos, each the size of a grain of rice, with translucent, pulsing hearts. Whole mouse embryos have typically been grown in vitro for only about 24 hours. But by carefully tuning…
Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark: Walter Freeman was itching for a shortcut. Since the 1930s, the Washington, D.C. neurologist had been drilling through the skulls of psychiatric patients to scoop out brain chunks in the hopes of calming their mental torment. But Freeman decided he wanted something simpler than a bone drill — he wanted a rod-like…
Elizabeth Svoboda in Undark: On the Puerto Rican island of Cayo Santiago, it’s the monkeys, not the humans, who are in charge. Yet this palm-fringed haven — home to about 1,000 rhesus macaques—can feel strangely similar to a weekend watering hole or middle-school cafeteria. Among these gregarious macaques, cliques, best-friend pairs, and social climbers are all…
Elizabeth Svoboda in Quanta: When cells are no longer needed, they die with what can only be called great dignity,” Bill Bryson wrote in A Short History of Nearly Everything. The received wisdom has long been that this march toward oblivion, once sufficiently advanced, cannot be reversed. But as science charts the contours of cellular function…
Elizabeth Svoboda and Undark in The Atlantic: As he neared his 50s, Anthony Andrews realized that living inside his own head felt different than it used to. The signs were subtle at first. “My wife started noticing that I wasn’t getting through things,” Andrews says. Every so often, he’d experience what he calls “cognitive voids,” where…
Justin E. H. Smith in his blog: Over the last few days, a disheartening consensus has emerged among self-styled Western progressives that there is little or nothing in the current Ukrainian revolution that merits solidarity. This mixture of wariness and indifference was already evident in the build-up to the bloody crackdown in Kyiv on February…
First, Volodymyr Ishchenko in Eurozine: [T]he open letter signed by established academics, many of whom are mainly politically progressive, ignores the extent of far-right involvement in the Ukrainian protests. One of the major forces at Euromaidan is the far-right xenophobic party “Svoboda” (“Freedom”). They are dominant among the volunteering guards of the protest camp and…
Engineers use a mathematical process dubbed ‘stylometry’ to set apart real Van Gogh paintings from forgeries. Elizabeth Svoboda in the Christian Science Monitor: After Japanese insurance kingpin Yasuo Goto won a high-stakes bidding war by offering $39.9 million for a painting at a 1987 auction, an unforeseen controversy erupted: Was the painting, Vincent van Gogh’s…
From Harvard Magazine: The Janelia Experiment: Great scientific research organizations, of the rare variety that produce multiple Nobel Prize-caliber breakthroughs, share common traits that can be imitated. This is the precept behind the creation of Janelia Farm, the new biological-research campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI). In November, scientists from the Harvard Stem…
Elizabeth Svoboda reviews The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life and How to Be Happy by Rudy Rucker, in the San Francisco Chronicle: A human brain, the assumption goes, is far more complex, incisive and unpredictable than any mere rules-governed machine. Rudy Rucker…
Elizabeth Svoboda reviews Before the Fallout: From Marie Curie to Hiroshima by Diana Preston, in the San Francisco Chronicle: The deliberations of the Manhattan Project’s kingpins at Los Alamos, N.M., have been hashed out ad infinitum in classic works such as Richard Rhodes’ “The Making of the Atomic Bomb.” Preston’s book escapes comparison with such…
Elizabeth Svoboda reviews Doctor Dolittle’s Delusion: Animals and the Uniqueness of Human Language by Stephen R. Anderson, in the San Francisco Chronicle: Alex, an African Grey parrot, knows what he wants and intends to get it. “Want nut!” he squawks at his scientist owner, Irene Pepperberg. Before he can get his reward, though, he has…