A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills o...
The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
Other mysteries have been untangled. Redheads are known to feel pain especially acutely. This confused researchers until someone realized that the same genetic mutation that causes red hair also incre...
Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total ab...
From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal, Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record o...
Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive.
A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on t...
Shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being, but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resourc...
Automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it.
We think of kindness as an emotional quality, but it’s also an act of imagination, of extending yourself beyond yourself, of feeling what you do not feel innately by invoking it.
Up close, aggressive measures are required to be impervious to suffering; you have to convince yourself that people deserve what they’re getting, that their suffering has nothing to do with you. Our c...
The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer...
Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that fro...
Were spoiling
Why would we have evolved this way? The most probable answer is that an organism that responds quickly to fast-changing social environments will more likely survive them. That organism won’t have to w...
We drove through the Old Dominion University campus, where a small permanent lake has formed in the back corner of a huge parking lot. You can’t pave under water, he noted dryly, so this obviously was...
Torcida told me a creation story of his people and why they consider Mount Gorongosa sacred. In early times, he said, God lived with his people on the mountain. Humans were giants then and not afraid...
Standard Oil issued a cool response: These men probably went insane because they worked too hard, according to the building manager. And those who didn’t survive had merely worked themselves to death....
Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas.