Relax. H1N1 is not going to be nearly as bad as you may have been led to believe…Unless …
The virus is out there, and has been all summer, circulating at a low level through the five boroughs, turning up in samples sent to the city’s public-health lab, popping up at sleepaway camps, making a winter [...]
In March of 1994 some spelunkers exploring an extensive cave system in northern Spain poked their lights into a small side gallery and noticed two human mandibles jutting out of the sandy soil. The cave, called El Sidrón, lay in the midst of a remote upland forest of chestnut and oak trees in the province [...]
In the early nineteen-eighties, a group of British epidemiologists at the University of Southampton compiled a grimly detailed atlas of the common causes of death in various parts of England and Wales. The atlas comtained page after page of maps for everything from cirrhosis of the liver (most common in industrial areas) to automobile accidents [...]
On a Thursday afternoon earlier this year, Willy Lensch sat at his desk in the “nonpresidential” section of a seventh-floor laboratory at Children’s Hospital Boston and watched in dismay as one of the recent congressional debates about embryonic stem cell research streamed into his laptop. Employing the arch rhetoric that has [...]
When the first thunderous boom echoed across the plain of Campania, quickly followed by a blistering hail of volcanic rock, the man and the woman hastily abandoned their village and made a run for it to the east, up a gently sloping hill toward what must have seemed like possible sanctuary in a nearby forest. [...]
It was late spring or early summer, when a modest tree called the hop hornbeam unfurls bright yellow clusters of flowers in the steep valleys that run north into the mountains now known as the Italian Alps. The man hurried through a forest he knew well, wincing from the pain in his injured right hand [...]
In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved [...]
Several years ago, around the time the Food and Drug Administration was considering the use of human growth hormone to treat extremely short but otherwise normal children, researchers were working up the results of a large-scale psychology experiment involving hundreds of middle-school and high-school students in the Buffalo area – including some who were extremely [...]
In the spring of 1992, out of the blue, the fax machine in Richard Davidson’s office at the department of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison spit out a letter from Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama. Davidson, a Harvard-trained neuroscientist, was making a name for himself studying the nature of positive emotion, [...]
On a wintry afternoon in April, Tim Tully and I stood in a laboratory at Helicon Therapeutics, watching the future of human memory and cognition–or at least a plausible version of that future–take shape. Outside, a freak spring snowstorm lashed at the Long Island landscape. I mention the weather because it [...]