Imagining the moon
Mare Crisium in a lithograph printed in 1834 from observations at the Royal Observatory in Edinburgh. The photograph was made by an amateur astronomer in 2010. The moon “appeared like […]
Polychrome humanity: Harwood’s ‘Bust of a Man’
People from Africa were widely present in 18th Century England, which by then had monopolized the colonial slave trade. From slave ships, many Africans made their way into domestic service […]
A robot judges my photos
Over the years, I’ve uploaded thousands of photos into online storage. On a whim last week, I typed the keyword ‘love’ into the search field. Google’s algorithm delivered one result: […]
How many scientists does it take to invent a cancer therapy?
I really love this data visualization by scientists at the University of California, San Francisco. Among other accomplishments, it deflates the myth of the solitary genius and shows the foundational […]
What a “game-changing” cancer therapy really looks like
A 55-year-old diagnosed with chronic myeloid leukemia in 1990 could expect to lose more than 20 years of life as a result of the cancer. By 2010, the loss in […]
Strangely beautiful visions of cancer
There’s a strange beauty to these technically superb visualizations of cancer. In the image above, a purple label marks lung cancer cells driven by the Kras oncogene in a genetically […]
Erring on the side of excess
Better safe than sorry. That’s how we tend to think about health care decisions. But as a guiding principle, it’s often a huge and costly mistake. Here’s an example. While […]
How cancer screening may fail to save lives
It could be that existing studies are simply underpowered to detect the overall benefit. But it’s also possible that the reduction in cancer deaths has been offset by increases in […]
Scientists’ clichéd superlatives
Scientists have discovered that everything they do is astonishingly robust, phenomenally novel, and groundbreakingly unprecedented. The authors of a new paper in the always entertaining Christmas issue of the British […]
Boars gone wild: Chernobyl edition
For wildlife, earth’s worst nuke disaster site continues to prove safer than living anywhere in range of humans. Ever since the 1986 Chernobyl accident, people have been almost entirely excluded […]
