[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Stretching.mp3[/podcast] There’s a perception that science is always reversing itself. If you don’t like what science has to say about, say, the health benefits or risks of a particular food (eggs, for example, or coffee), you only have to wait awhile until a contradictory study comes out. That’s because science progresses in fits and starts. …
Category: Science Columns
Insight into the theory of mind
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Theory-of-Mind.mp3[/podcast] This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but in addition to writing nonfiction, I also write fiction—specifically, science fiction and fantasy. Now, the writing of fiction is a very odd thing, in that it involves the making up of characters: people who don’t really exist, but for whom the …
Talk to the right ear
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Talk-to-the-right-ear.mp3[/podcast] If someone approaches you from your left side and makes a request, are you more or less likely to grant that request than if he approaches you from your right side? If you’re thinking, “What kind of a stupid question is that?”, and you think it would be an equally stupid question no matter …
Are cognitive shortcuts making us fat?
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Cognitive-Shortcuts-to-Obesity.mp3[/podcast] When we think about how we make decisions, we tend to imagine that we consider the facts of a situation carefully and logically, in a straightforward, step-by-step manner. But that process is, indeed, imaginary. The truth is that our brains prefer to do as little actual thinking as possible. They like shortcuts—and sometimes those …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Marta Guerra and Ebola
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/marta-guerra-and-ebola.mp3[/podcast] Here’s one last column condensed from a chapter in my new children’s book Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases (Enslow Publishers): In the movie Outbreak, researchers from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have to figure out how to stop a kind …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Jonathan Runstadler investigates bird flu in Alaska
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/jonathan-runstadler-and-bird-flu.mp3[/podcast] Here’s another column drawn from one of the chapters of my new book Disease-Hunting Scientist (Enslow Publishers): Every spring, an estimated six million birds arrive in Alaska to breed. Some spent the winter in Southeast Asia, home to a strain of avian influenza called H5N1. Although swine flu is getting all the attention right …
Disease-Hunting Scientist: Dr. Laurie Richardson and black-band disease in coral
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/laurie-richardson-and-black-band-disease.mp3[/podcast] My newest book, Disease-Hunting Scientist (Enslow Publishers) has now been officially released, and so this week I’m giving you a column-sized version of another of the lengthy chapters devoted to individual scientists in the book. Dr. Laurie Richardson, Professor of Biology at Florida International University in Miami, is researching black-band disease in coral reefs—which …
Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try …
R.I.P.: the girl who named Pluto
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/the-girl-who-named-pluto-rip.mp3[/podcast] Three years ago I wrote a column about someone I was astonished I’d never heard of until that week: Venetia Phair (née Burney), at the time an 87-year-old retired schoolteacher in Epsom, England. At the age of 11 Venetia suggested the name Pluto for what was then (and for many decades after) considered the …
Reverse-engineering the brain
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/blue-brain.mp3[/podcast] Ah, the human brain. Seat of consciousness, miracle of creation or evolution (discuss amongst yourselves), able to jump to tall conclusions in a single bound, so incredibly complex that we’ll never be able to understand how it works. Um, not so fast. A year and a half ago, scientists at the Blue Brain Project …
Why sunlight in your eyes can make you sneeze
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/04/photic-sneezing.mp3[/podcast] “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,” the late John Denver sang. “Sunlight in my eyes can make me cry.” Lovely lyrics. But as a kid, I thought it would have made more sense for Denver to sing, “Sunlight in my eyes can make me sneeze.” Because for somewhere between one in 10 and …
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