Science

On the night of Jan. 29, 2014, an exhausted, heavily bearded man washed ashore on an uninhabited beach in the Marshall Islands. His name was Jose Salvador Alvarenga, and, incredibly, he was alive, despite having spent 14 months stranded on the open ocean. The next morning, Alvarenga shouted and waved his arms

“This Baby Will Live to be 120”: so read the headline, accompanied by an image of a precious smiling baby, that ran across the cover of the May 2013 National Geographic Magazine. The associated article profiled scientists who scan the DNA of centenarians with the goal of identifying genes that are correlated

Whenever I hear talk of marijuana legalization on this campus, I am a little dismayed. This is not because I have a particular opinion that is challenged by my peers, but because I tend to only hear one or two arguments surrounding the issue.  One is sociopolitical, involving discussions about

In 2011, the world witnessed perhaps the most important game of Jeopardy! that has ever been played. The contestants were two Jeopardy!-made millionaires, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, and an untested newcomer—a supercomputer named Watson. Through the course of two matches, Watson completely dismantled his creative and brilliant human counterparts.

Imagine you wake up one morning and as you get out of bed you notice something strange—your left leg. It looks totally normal, like a mirror image of your right leg. But something is different, wrong about it. You see it attached to your body, but, inexplicably, you know that

In lieu of a column this week, I had the opportunity to sit down with the keynote speaker for Pomona’s Moving Minds Symposium, Dr. V.S. Ramachandran. Our talk ranged from how arts and sciences interact, to the nature of consciousness, to the importance of liberal arts colleges in understanding the

Dear reader, I regret to inform you that you are, at most, only 10 percent human. This may come as a surprise to you. Understandably, most of us operate under the assumption that we are what we see in the mirror: a collection of a trillion or so human cells

Every single day, your brain makes an almost unquantifiable number of decisions. In the last five minutes alone, it decided where, how, and why you would sit or stand where you currently are. This decision was based on information about your mood, your current responsibilities, and your perception of the

I think everyone has seen enough pictures of Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, and tentatively named baby “North” to know what designer clothes are. But garments are not the only things that come in “designer” varieties. That label can be applied to everything from furniture to jewelry, from accessories to …

One of the most iconic lines from Keanu Reeves’s most iconic film comes when Reeves, playing Neo in The Matrix, connects to a computer, twitches as if receiving an electric shock, and then opens his eyes and says, “I know kung fu.” This is certainly not the most extreme technological