Science
Gaming: Harnessing the Cognitive Surplus
Harnessing the Cognitive Surplus By James Scott-Brown How do you spend your free time? If you were an average American, you would spend 20 hours a week watching television, and another 3 hours playing games [1]. Clay Shirky has written about how, after the Second World War, enormous changes in society occurred, so that “society [...]
What Makes a Pretty Face? The Biological Basis of Beauty
Biological Basis of Beauty By Thomas Gizbert Poet and philosophical essayist Kahlil Gibran wrote in the early 20th century, “Beauty is not in the face; beauty is a light in the heart” [1]. However, a number of recent studies are building a scientific case against this statement, claiming that beauty resides not in the heart, [...]
Chemzymes, Challenging Nature: How Artificial Enzymes Are Becoming Nature’s Counterparts
Enzymes were discovered as early as the nineteenth century, [15] when Eduard Buchner extracted the enzyme responsible for the fermentation of sugars from yeast into alcohol. Besides earning him the Nobel Prize, Buchner’s work began the process of elucidating the diverse functions of enzymes, thousands of which have since been identified [12]. They allow us [...]
Learning (and Loving) a Foreign Language
Throughout my high school years, among the things always stashed away in my frayed lime-colored backpack, alongside my IB Chemistry study guide and a slew of math practice tests, was a sheet of vibrantly pink construction paper. On this were written a number of short songs, rhymes, charts and acronyms, all thought up to help [...]
Dying Without Sleep: Insomnia and its Implications
Ideally, humans sleep for at least eight hours every day, meaning that we spend about a third of our lives “unconscious.” Scientists have yet to agree on why this unconsciousness is vital, but we know that without sleep, all mammals and birds would die [1]. Because sleep has only become the subject of research in [...]
The Altruism of Recycling
Why do we recycle? A 1996 New York Times commentary declared recycling to be “the most wasteful activity in modern America” [1]. Critics have suggested that recycling lowers industrial rates of production and consumes enough energy to easily outweigh its scant benefits to the environment [2]. On the other hand, there is also evidence proposing [...]
Facts for Digestion: The Negative Effects of an Animal-Heavy Diet
A jet plane streaks across a caerulean backdrop, expelling a stream of smoke as it goes. An SUV cruises along the road, leaving a quickly dissipating trail of carbon dioxide in its wake. A coal factory darkens the sky view, interrupting the blue patches with plumes of smog. These are the typical images which come [...]
NASA’s Life changing Arsenic Organism?
NASA held a press conference on December 2, 2010, about their discovery of a bacterium researchers claimed was able to use arsenic, instead of phosphorous, as part of its DNA backbone. This press conference was extremely well advertised and promised the existence of something extraterrestrial. But the organism in question, GFAJ-1, is far from extraterrestrial [...]
Epigenetics: What It Means and Why You Should Care
Fundamental shifts in the way we understand our world and ourselves are rare, and when they do happen it is often with uproar. When discovery of the DNA double helix by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 showed us that all of nature was bound together by a common molecular mechanism, it was assumed [...]
Harry Potter: Why Do Muggles Hate Magic ?
“Knew! Knew! Of course we knew! How could you not be, my dratted sister being what she was? Oh, she got a letter just like that and disappeared off to that — that school — and came home every vacation with her pockets full of frog spawn, turning teacups into rats. I was the only [...]
Is All Fair in Love and Sport?
In the world of competitive sports, one hundredth of a second – the time it takes for lightning to strike – can define an athlete. One hundredth of a second can mean the difference between winning or losing, fame or anonymity, millions of dollars in endorsements or none. Because we handsomely reward strength, speed, and [...]
The Dirt that Solves Global Warming
Introduction By the end of the century, 182 million sub-Saharan Africans could die of disease directly attributable to climate change. By 2030, more than 60 million more Africans will be exposed to malaria if temperatures rise by 2 degrees Celsius. One-sixth of the world’s population will face water shortages because of the retreating glaciers [1]. Because [...]
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