Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake Random House, 2020 ($28) Fungi make up an understudied kingdom of life-forms, often ignored unless they manifest as mushrooms, ferment a drink or rot a wood structure. But behind the scenes—and often belowground—fungi are the heavy lifters in complex […]
Roots of Unity | Opinion Creating poetry with the fundamental theorem of arithmetic Credit: Renaud Camus Flickr (CC BY 2.0) Advertisement When I put together my page-a-day calendar, published by the American Mathematical Society (why, yes, it is still available; thanks for asking), I knew I wanted to include a healthy dose of poetry. I love […]
I should warn you. This is not going to be fun. But if you do read through to the end you may come away with a greater sense of control and perhaps, just perhaps, optimism in these unsettling times. The not fun part is all about stepping back to examine the current state of human […]
In a recent column, I speculated that the coronavirus pandemic will make us more socialist, by which I mean simply that governments take more from the rich and give more to poor. I specified that this shift would be consistent with democracy. Now, following my pattern of veering between Pollyannaism and dread, I’ll consider whether the pandemic will make […]
This essay first appeared on The MIT Reader on April 20, 2020 Across the world, many of us are imagining a possible rendezvous with Death. Some are turning to common addictions, such as alcohol and drugs. A study last week found that nearly 40 percent of remote-working New Yorkers are drinking while working, and one […]
For a substance known for its abundance, persistence, and rock-bottom prices, there is an enduring mystery to dirt: where does it come from? Generally speaking, it sits at the nexus of geology, meteorology, and time. Rock becomes dirt via weathering. But it is a process that is necessarily difficult for humans to observe. It’s long been assumed that […]
Scientific American May 2020 Letters to the editor from the January 2020 issue of Scientific American BRAIN EXERCISES In devising recommendations for exercise regimens to enhance cognition in healthy individuals and those experiencing cognitive decline, as discussed by David A. Raichlen and Gene E. Alexander [“Why Your Brain Needs Exercise”], scientists would do well to talk to […]
The Amazon rainforest is under threat. Fragmentation, fires, and climate change are just a few of the hazards. In natural, intact forests, animals that eat fruits help to keep the forest in a constant state of regeneration since they deposit seeds in their droppings as they travel. Could the same process help restore areas degraded […]
A cutting-edge NASA satellite has provided one of the most detailed looks yet at glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica. The findings are clearer than ever: Both ice sheets are losing billions of tons of mass into the ocean each year, contributing significantly to global sea-level rise. The results were published yesterday in the journal Science by a team of […]
SARS, Ebola and now SARS-CoV-2: all three of these highly infectious viruses have caused global panic since 2002—and all three of them jumped to humans from wild animals that live in dense tropical forests. Three quarters of the emerging pathogens that infect humans leaped from animals, many of them creatures in the forest habitats that […]