The Black Mathematician Who Resisted Nuclear War
When J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. graduated from the University of Chicago in 1942 with a PhD in mathematics at the age of nineteen, he became one of the one half...
Margaret S. Collins, Pioneering Black Entomologist
Born in 1922, Margaret James Strickland Collins was the first African American woman entomologist in the United States, at a time when the country made higher education difficult, if not...
Puffins Seen Using Tools, Breaking Dumb-Puffin Stereotypes
If bird intelligence were like high school, corvids (crows, ravens, jays) would be the whiz kids. They make and use tools for multiple purposes: to get at food, to poke...
Take These Teenage Dinosaurs Seriously!
Q. How can tell you tell how old a dinosaur is? A. Count the rings… In 2005, two partial dinosaur skeletons were found at the Hell Creek Formation site, which...
The Vast Influence of Ibn Sina, Pioneer of Medicine
One thousand years ago, medicine not only looked different from what it is now, it also varied geographically. While many of the scientific texts of the Greeks were lost to...
The Measles Might Make Your Body “Forget” Its Own Immunity
In June 2011, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that rinderpest—a deadly disease affecting cattle and other ungulates, related to measles—had been eradicated from the earth. A month later, The...
Can CRISPR Save Tufty Fluffytail?
When Beatrix Potter wrote The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin, it was 1903, and the squirrels that populated her books were the English countryside’s native Eurasian red (Sciurus vulgaris), with tufted...
Stuck in the Midden with You
To paraphrase an old adage, one species’ garbage is another’s bounty (of research material). Refuse sites called middens can be as simple as a single household’s outdoor pit, or an...
When Cancer Spreads between Species
If you’re a multicellular organism (and you are), you’re at some risk to get cancer (with very few exceptions). The disease is both simple (uncontrolled cell proliferation) and exceedingly complex...
What’s in a (Planet) Name?
January 1, 2020 will be the first anniversary of the spacecraft New Horizon’s visit to Arrokoth, a minor planet 4 billion miles away from ours—the farthest object ever visited by...