Author: Mary

Why, you might ask, should you not offend a crow? (Other than the fact that they’re smart [and smart-ass] birds who deserve a little respect, that is.) We...

OK, this one is off the beaten path, but bear with me. This article from Wilson Quarterly is about a traffic engineer, Hans Monderman, but it also covers some t...

Once when I heard Daniel Dennett giving a talk, he spoke briefly on the curious nature of reality and magic. What many people would call real magic—genuinely ma...

The EPOXI mission of NASA’s Deep Impact spacecraft took pictures of Earth late in May 2008 from 31 million miles away, with the goal of examining Earth as...

Humankind’s urge to seek patterns and ability to recognize them—or even to find them where they don’t exist—is well known and is arguably one of our...

The New Yorker had a good article this week about the work of Irene Pepperberg, the researcher who worked with the African gray parrot Alex until his death last...

Well, I’m back from a wonderful trip to the Southwest, and the first thing I saw when I went to EurekAlert was this press release about dictionaries and b...

I’m going to be away from the blog for a few days, so I’ll leave you a few big things to chew over this weekend. First, from Edge.org, this article ...

Anyone who knows me has probably heard me fulminate about the mad proliferation of choices we face when shopping. Do we really need a dozen flavors of Cheez-Its...

The New York Times has a good article on frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and creativity. FTD is a rare disorder, or perhaps more accurately a cluster of related d...