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The Future of Language

After linguist Philip Seargeant’s grandmother suffered a stroke, her thoughts remained trapped in her body. Although she had no cognitive damage, her paralyzed muscles didn’t allow her to speak or write. To communicate, she would point to letters printed on one side of a tattered...

Crossings

Anyone who has crossed a busy road in a metropolis without well-regulated traffic, in say Mumbai, India, can understand the plight of a deer trying to cross a two-lane highway, in rural United States. Evolution has not prepared deer for encounters with automobiles. Over one...

Virtual Therapeutics

Phantom limb pain is a neurological paradox: a limb that no longer exists can still hurt. For many amputees, the sensation is intense, persistent, and unmistakably real. The sensation has been described in medical literature as far back as in the 16th century and has...

The mRNA Nobelist

In 1997, at a University of Pennsylvania photocopier, molecular biologist Katalin Karikó met immunologist Drew Weismann — a chance encounter that would change her career, and medicine, forever. At 42, Karikó had made little headway with her radical idea: that messenger RNA, the fleeting molecule...

Vera Rubin

VERA RUBIN began her career at a time when women were denied access to telescopes at leading observatories. Eventually her work helped scientists rethink the content of the cosmos. In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, science writer Ashley Jean Yeager traces the journey of this...

Science at Sundance 2023

This year I had a chance to review two science-related films screened at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah — two vastly different films, but both struck a chord. Illustration by Islenia Mil for Science Poacher A gunshot pierces the skull of a tusker, an adult...