Opening Day may seem far in the distant future, but that doesn’t stop us from counting down the days until pitchers and catchers report for the spring season, and for the official start of spring training.
But there is no better way to celebrate the Cubs’ World Series than taking a closer look at what happens on the ballfield: Why does Jon Lester’s curveball curve? How did David Ross handle all those fastballs? And what’s the quickest way for Dexter Fowler to run around the bases? Continue reading “The Physics of Baseball: What Newton said to the Billygoat”
The human race, like all macrobiological life, evolved in a sea of microbes. There was no way to keep the bacterial and archaeal hoards at bay, so instead life evolved mechanisms to live with these invaders. The immune system was refined over millions of years to control our interaction with the microbial world, and even to use it as a mechanism of defense, food processing, and vitamin production. Continue reading “How the Indoor Microbiome Influence Health”
The brain is what allows us to function, yet we understand little about how it works.
Using electrodes implanted inside people’s brains during surgery we can learn how thinking, deciding, feeling and dreaming works. In this talk, you will learn about the current neuroscience research about the way our neurons code our behavior, and how understanding this can help us grasp the nature of free will and our identity kernels. Continue reading “Hacking the Brain to Find Ourselves”
Female apes are easily overshadowed by their larger, more boisterous male counterparts. Thus, the nature of female social relationships has been shrouded in mystery. The subtlety of social behavior in female chimpanzees belies a complex set of strategies that allow them to navigate the costs and benefits of group life.
Continue reading “The Secret Lives of Female Chimpanzees”
In the past decade, we’ve heard a lot about the innate differences between males and females. So we’ve come to accept that boys can’t focus in a classroom and girls are obsessed with relationships: “That’s just the way they’re built.” Continue reading “The Myth of Brain Sex”
