The Earth is a recycling scheme that has been running for a third of the age of the universe. Microbes and plants endlessly pull carbon, nitrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere and pump them back out in different forms. Water evaporates from the oceans, rains down on the land, pours back to the seas. As … Read more
Apparently Facebook isn’t just for playing MafiaWars anymore. It’s also for finding living unrelated donors to give you their organs. Seriously. The six degrees of separation that we all experience via Facebook makes those who have long been waiting on organ transplant lists feel as though the wait can end if they just reach out … Read more
Christopher Nolan’s Inception may have left us emotionally cold, but it did make our brains overheat. The puzzlelike film is stuffed with so much detail it threatens to collapse in on itself, just like that folding city—while also providing enough material for careful (obsessed?) viewers to excavate several plausible interpretations. Here are some of the … Read more
Emrys Westacott asks a probing question. Imagine that right after briefing Adam about which fruit was allowed and which forbidden, God had installed a closed-circuit television camera in the garden of Eden, trained on the tree of knowledge. Think how this might have changed things for the better. The serpent sidles up to Eve and … Read more
It took a gay Republican judge with libertarian leanings to issue from the bench, in a US District courthouse in San Francisco, one of the warmest testimonials to the married state since Erasmus. Last Wednesday Vaughan R. Walker struck down California’s ban on gay marriage, prompting ecstatic rejoicing among a mostly gay crowd outside the … Read more