Animal personalities
One of my sons keeps pet snakes. When he was younger, I had some contact with the snakes and was struck by the degree to which they seem to have distinct person...
Author: Mary
Book review: The Three-Pound Enigma
The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries, by Shannon Moffett. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2006. This overview of the cu...
Book review: The Echo Maker
I began reading The Echo Maker, the latest novel by Richard Powers, with high hopes, but overall it was a disappointment. Powers is an intelligent writer of amb...
Ancient observatory
This press release from Eurekalert from last month describes some discoveries about an ancient Peruvian observatory. I love observatories, and am fascinated by ...
The intelligence of ravens
I’ve always been amused by the rowdy wise-guy behavior of crows, and I greatly enjoyed David Quammen’s essay explaining bad-boy crows as classic cas...
Book review: The Varieties of Scientific Experience
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, by Carl Sagan. Penguin, 2006. Carl Sagan’s death in December 1996 at the ag...
Book review: The Creative Brain
The Creative Brain: The Science of Genius, by Nancy Andreasen. Penguin, 2006. Creativity is something of a mystery. Where do brilliant innovative ideas come fro...
Too busy for beauty?
One rush hour morning in January, the Washington Post ran a little experiment: having renowned violinist Joshua Bell play at a Metro station with his open violi...
Spring fever!
We’ve had a wave of unusually warm weather here over the past couple of weeks; the early spring flowers are in full bloom and the trees are starting to sh...
Out-of-body and near-death experiences
Sometimes an out-of-body experience (OOBE) accompanies a near-death experience (NDE); OOBEs also happen sometimes during the transition between sleeping and wak...