The program, known as T4, would ultimately claim 200,000 lives. It operated on a scale so far beyond what the Nazis had attempted before that they had to invent new technology for the slaughter—includ...
Some ancient eukaryote swallowed a photosynthesizing bacteria and became a sunlight gathering alga. Millions of years later one of these algae was devoured by a second eukaryote. This new host gutted...
One reason that cells break down bone is that in old age they make less of a protein called TERT. In 2012, researchers at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre coaxed old mice to make extra TERT...
Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties, Galton predicted.
It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights, Pearl wrote. Though the mind has gone away, though he cannot spea...
It is we who are the parasites, and Earth the host
In the eighteenth century, the average European man stood just five foot five.
In 2009, for example, a team of scientists at MIT succeded in implanting a wireless electrode into a zebra fish. With the press of a button, the scientists could wirelessly transmit a signal to the so...
If you stop and think through what it means to grow, the process is astonishing. Each part of the body has to change its shape and size to match every other part. There’s no central blueprint for the...
If heredity is a kind of memory, methylation suffers radical amnesia in every generation.
Guns and slavery grew even more intertwined in the Galton family fortune. By the 1750s, the Galtons were delivering more than twenty-five thousand guns a year to European traders, who sold the weapons...
Dolphins may even be able to name each other with signature whistles. But their society may nevertheless be one of an overlapping network of minds, wandering linked through a transparent ocean.
Based on their research, the Sanger scientists estimated that an embryo gains two or three new mutations every time its cells double.
At long last, we may be returning to the original two-sided sense of the word virus, which originally signified either a life-giving substance or a deadly venom. Viruses are indeed exquisitely deadly,...
According to Goddard’s standards, 47 percent of the white soldiers and 89 percent of the blacks should be categorized as morons. The average white soldier, the psychologists found, had a mental age of...
What is striking about them is that the father-leaning disorders tend to produce autistic symptoms. The mother-leaning disorders tend to produce schizophrenic ones.
Scientists have found that when test monkeys spent five minutes learning how to use a rake, some of the neurons that responded to touching their hands began behaving in a new way. They began to fire i...
In 2011, a seventeen-year-old Israeli girl named Chen Aida Ayash was killed in a car accident. After her death, her parents asked for doctors to collect some eggs from her cadaver. They had to go to c...
Gravettian men stood on average six feet tall. When agriculture arrived in Europe some eight thousand years ago, people experienced a tremendous drop in stature. Men lost eight inches of height. The d...
Goddard seemed comfortable with the notion that 40 percent of immigrants were morons. It is admitted on all sides that we are getting now the poorest of each race,