“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names shall never hurt me,” was an old adage way back in the early 1800s. For over 200 years it soothed and encouraged many a bullied student and adult. But no...

I fast once a month. It’s hard. Even though I’ve been doing it for years, I start dreading my fast day the night before; fretting about how I’m going to be able to pass through the discomfort. And where I’m...

  In 2001, a group of Japanese scientists made a startling discovery at a rubbish dump. In trenches packed with dirt and waste, they found a slimy film of bacteria that had been happily chewing through plastic bottles, toys and...

Ever had someone tell you to just cheer up? Did it drive you crazy? Well, turns out that someone telling you to “be happy” isn’t just annoying—it’s also wildly unhelpful. “‘Happy’ is a pretty useless word,” says Dr. Martin Seligman...

An estimated 23.5 million Americans, including my husband, suffer from an autoimmune condition — and their numbers are growing, though researchers don’t know why. You’ve likely heard of the most common autoimmune diseases — including type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple...

Whenever I am faced with life’s uncertainty, I ask myself the following questions: Why is this happening? What can I do to make it go away? How can I navigate this effectively? What can I learn from this experience? Being...

The chorus of the theme song for the movie Fame, performed by actress Irene Cara, includes the line “I’m gonna live forever.” Cara was, of course, singing about the posthumous longevity that fame can confer. But a literal expression of...

Many people cheat on taxes — no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught — now, that’s weird. Or is it? Psychologists are deeply perplexed by human moral behavior, because it often doesn’t seem to make...

 My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again — leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Her forehead crinkled as I download the Alexa app on her phone...

If you want to learn something about change there is no better place to look than evolution. Nothing represents a continuous and unrelenting cycle of order, disorder, and reorder on a grander scale. For long periods of time, Earth is relatively...

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed. According to current understanding, there are four fundamental forces in nature, three of...

In approximately one month and 10 days, I’ll be on my way to making one of the larger decisions of my adult life (so far, anyway); I’m moving to Austin, Texas, approximately 2,000 miles and one hell of a road...

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure...

  One could be forgiven for a little genetic déjà vu. Launched in 1990, the Human Genome Project unveiled its first readout of the human DNA sequence with great fanfare in 2000. The human genome was declared essentially complete in...

We’re surrounded by negativity everywhere we turn. The news we read, social media we peruse, and conversations we have and overhear. We absorb stress from our family, friends, and coworkers. And, it’s taking a toll. The Mighty, a community platform...

Pandemic life had a way of revealing our weaknesses. For those of us of a certain age, I mean that literally. If you are feeling like certain household activities — toting groceries, hoisting children, moving furniture, carrying laundry — are...

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world. In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at...

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability? To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our...