The widespread use of colorful terms like “bomb cyclone” and “atmospheric river,” along with the proliferating categories, colors and names of storms and weather patterns, has struck meteorologists as a mixed blessing: good for public safety and climate-change awareness but potentially so amplified that it leaves the public numb to
A professor of evolutionary biology explains: "We inherited the major nerves we use in breathing from fish. We became heir to this design from fishy ancestors with gills closer to the neck, not a diaphragm well below it. The characteristic pattern of muscle and nerve activity of hiccups occurs
Singer Nick Cave has dissected a song produced by the viral chatbot software ChatGPT that was supposedly written in the style of Nick Cave, calling it “bullshit” and “a grotesque mockery of what it is to be human." Writing in his newsletter the Red Hand Files on Monday, Cave
Richard Dadd was a young British painter of huge promise who fell into mental illness while touring the Mediterranean in the early 1840s. Among the symptoms of Dadd’s illness were delusions of persecution and the receipt of messages from the Ancient Egyptian deity Osiris. He spent over forty years
Just after Christmas, the writer Hanif Kureishi was taking a long walk in Rome, where he and his wife, Isabella D’Amico, were spending the holiday, when he suddenly collapsed onto the sidewalk. He fell awkwardly, twisting his neck and grievously injuring the top of his spine. Taken to the
Amanda Florian writes about coming across an ad that seemed to have her face in it: "I woke up to a text from a friend in Shanghai, China. “Hey, Amanda—is this you?” he wrote via WeChat. I hadn’t even had my morning coffee yet. I pulled my
Vicente Lusitano was an African-Portuguese composer and music theorist who was most likely born between 1520 and 1522, and who died sometime after 1562. Probably the child of an enslaved African woman and a Portuguese noble, Lusitano traversed Europe in a career that saw him depart the Iberian Peninsula for
Ice Age hunter-gatherers in Europe used cave drawings to record detailed information about the lives of animals around them, a new study claims. Markings found on paintings dating back at least 20,000 years have long been suspected as having meaning but had not been decoded until now. The initial
Nearly 200 miles of tunnels snake beneath Helsinki, providing a weatherproof subterranean playground for the Finnish capital’s residents and visitors. Yet hidden behind the bright lights of the underground attractions—which include a museum, church, go-kart track, hockey rink, and more—are emergency shelters fitted with life-sustaining equipment: an
Almost everything you need to know about this piece is in the headline. Except why, of course :-) In any case, this essay by Richard Kemick is worth a read: "I can't remember not wanting a miniature Christmas village. It’s like how I can’t remember
The Ward, a reading group founded by Tennessee-based author Susan Meachen, largely went dormant after a September 2020 post — supposedly written by her daughter — was shared from her page announcing that she had died by suicide following bullying and harassment from members of the book community. Now, more than two
A young male walrus named Thor has ventured far from his usual polar habitat in the past few months, turning up in the town of Scarborough in Yorkshire (he has also been spotted on the south coast as well as in France and the Netherlands). Large crowds gathered behind a