The following is an excerpt from Modern Romance, by Aziz Ansari, with Eric Klinenberg. Listen to SciFri on September 4, 2015, to hear Ansari and others discuss the state of modern dating. The quality of dates is one thing, but what about the quantity? When thinking about that question, I recalled a change I made […]
The follwing is an excerpt from Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. Listen to Gawande on Science Friday this Friday, October 10. I learned about a lot of things in medical school, but mortality wasn’t one of them. Although I was given a dry, leathery corpse to dissect in my first term, that was solely a […]
Introduction Renewable resources are natural resources that naturally replenish themselves, such as fish and trees. Humans can use renewable resources again and again if we manage them properly. But if we don’t give these resources an opportunity to reproduce, we can exhaust them quickly, especially as our demand grows. The tragedy of the commons theory […]
Listen to Paul Raeburn chat with SciFri about Do Fathers Matter? I got interested in fatherhood in the usual way: I had children. In the 1980s, I had three children by my first marriage—two boys and a girl, who are now grown and prospering. A decade ago I remarried, and my wife Elizabeth and I […]
One of my favorite invisible-ink stories, that didn’t make the book, is about a Thomas Robins, imprisoned in Britain’s Wandsworth Prison, who developed invisible ink from oatmeal, or porridge, as it is called in Britain, in 1935. He squeezed a portion of porridge “through a piece of rag” and then used the liquid with an […]