It takes a village
Author: lioneltan
How surgeons learned to operate on beating hearts
Less than 70 years ago, it was almost impossible to safely operate on a beating heart. That is, until a handful of surgeons solved the challenge – and paved the way for life-saving techniques.
Escalator Etiquette: Should I Stand or Walk for an Efficient Ride?
Love them or hate them, traffic laws exist to keep people safe and to help vehicles flow smoothly. And while they aren’t legally enforceable, pedestrian traffic also tends to follow its own set of unwritten rules.
The 9 Types of People You’ll Meet in Retirement
Everyone’s experience in retirement is unique. But there are some characterizations we can draw from data collected in various surveys and studies of retirees.
Why can you only fold paper 7 times, regardless of its size? Are there any other materials that can be folded more times, or is 7 some kind of hard cap?
The Mythbusters managed to break the 7 fold barrier but they started with a piece of paper that was about half the size of a football field.
Can Civilization Survive What’s Coming?
A thousand years from now, when some vaguely human-like machine digs through the ashes of the Twenty-First century and tries to figure out what happened to those once-thriving animals called Homo sapiens, it may be confused about why an intelligent species that could build rockets and write songs like “Imagine” couldn’t heed warnings of its own destruction. A key question for future historians of the universe: How stupid were those humans anyway?
Science Proves a Harsh Truth About Very Good Dogs
You know how your heart melts whenever a pup raises its eyebrows? That’s no accident. While research on non-human animals has long suggested that facial expressions are involuntary, it turns out dogs may be different, and like humans, able to control their facial expressions to get what they want. Are you really surprised?
It Might Be Time to Update the Old ‘Alfa-Bravo-Charlie’ Spelling Alphabet
When someone on the phone—the doctor’s office, the bank, the credit card company—asks for my name, I always offer to spell it out—it’s a pretty uncommon surname. So far as I know, there are somewhere between 10 and 20 Nosowitzes in the world, and they’re all closely related to me. Because it’s uncommon, and because it would be a problem if my bank writes my name down as “Moskowitz,” I err on the side of caution. “N as in Nancy, O, S as in Samuel, O, W, I, T as in Thomas, Z as in Zebra,” I chant.
Why Hundreds of Mathematicians Are Boycotting Predictive Policing
Several prominent academic mathematicians want to sever ties with police departments across the U.S., according to a letter submitted to Notices of the American Mathematical Society on June 15. The letter arrived weeks after widespread protests against police brutality, and has inspired over 1,500 other researchers to join the boycott.
How one couple has lived for 29 years on an island they built themselves
As stay-at-home orders due to the ongoing pandemic have forced many of us to learn to love solitude and become reacquainted with our homes, one couple’s life has remained virtually unchanged.