Blog
How Whales Went From Walking on Land to Ruling the Ocean
A blue whale never sets foot on land, never breathes anything but ocean air through a hole in the top of its…
Publications
Theses, research papers, blogs, stories, ideas, and insights, published by the people who wrote them.
All publications
Blog
Insight
Why Is the Night Sky Dark? The Paradox That Took 400 Years to Solve
Look up on a clear, moonless night and you see mostly black, punctured by a scattering of points of light. It feels…
Blog
What Crows Actually Understand: Tool Use, Memory, and Grudges
In 2005, a New Caledonian crow named Betty was handed a straight piece of wire and a small bucket of food sitting…
Blog
Tardigrades: The Animal That Can Survive Being Dried, Frozen, and Blasted With Radiation
Most animals die if you take away their water for more than a few days. Tardigrades, eight-legged creatures smaller than a grain…
Insight
Why You Can’t Tickle Yourself: The Brain’s Own Prediction Engine
Try it right now. Run your own fingers along the bottom of your foot or under your arm, the exact spots that…
Insight
How General Anesthesia Actually Turns Off Consciousness (and Why We Still Don’t Fully Know How)
Every day, millions of people are put under general anesthesia, wheeled into an operating room, cut open, stitched back up, and wake…
Insight
What Voyager 1 Has Taught Us Since It Left the Solar System
Voyager 1 launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn up close. Nearly fifty years later, it’s still transmitting, still returning real…
Insight
Why Time Runs Slower Near a Black Hole
Time isn’t the same everywhere. That’s not a metaphor. According to general relativity, gravity actually slows the passage of time, and near…
Insight
Do Elephants Grieve? What the Evidence Actually Shows
For decades the safe scientific position was that attributing grief to animals was projection, reading human emotion onto behavior that probably meant…
Insight
The Octopus Has Nine Brains and Most of the Thinking Isn’t in Its Head
An octopus has about 500 million neurons, roughly on par with a dog. What makes an octopus strange isn’t the total number,…
Insight
The Vagus Nerve: The Body’s Longest Line of Communication
The vagus nerve doesn’t get talked about much outside of anatomy class, which is strange given what it actually does. It’s the…
Insight
Why Your Brain Rewrites a Memory Every Time You Recall It
Most people treat memory like a recording. You store an event once, and from then on you can play it back, slightly…