“Strictly speaking, smells exist only in our heads,” writes psychologist and smell expert Avery Gilbert. “Molecules exist in the air, but we can only register some of them as ‘smells.’” It is impossible even to count how many scents there are. Yet the ...
A new show on Nova offers easily digestible chunks of science.06.17.2008 Researchers are again using mind-bending drugs as a means of treating mental disorders.05.16.2008 Chimpanzees are downright conservative when it comes to trading for better food. 0 ...
Edge work: “Programming” viruses to perform useful tasks Why? It is clean and efficient. Where? MIT Initial response: “I was called insane.” When 40-year-old materials chemist Angela Belcher was a child, she wanted to be an inventor. “I would try to ...
1. Afar, Ethiopia The Afar region, a low-lying spot in northern Ethiopia, is home to two important anthropological discoveries: the famous hominid fossil Lucy and the world’s oldest stone tools. But it has several other distinctive features. Located ...
Doug Bearden paces back and forth asking his wife if he’s dead. And how did he die? And who killed him? He asks these questions repeatedly despite his wife Cindy’s reassurances that nobody killed him and that he isn’t dead. Like the other people whom ...
“Sometimes I think my head is so big because it is so full of dreams,” says John Merrick in the play The Elephant Man. He might have been speaking for the Boskops, an almost forgotten group of early humans who lived in southern Africa between 30,000 ...
Abandoned for half a century, the mining town of Bodie, California, is now preserved in a state of "arrested decay" by the park system. Gaze into one of the ramshackle buildings in Bodie, California, and you might see dust-covered furniture, an old ...
Picking the best and worst of anything will get you a lot of grief. So we applaud Sidney Perkowitz, an Emory University physics professor, for his courage in choosing the best and worst science-based movies of all time. Of course, we are outraged he ...
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