The number of climate-driven natural disasters per year has more than doubled since the 1980s. Meanwhile average global temperature increased less than one degree. We know how to slow the increase. It’s a win-win. Slowing it will keep us safer and will save all of us lots of money. Step one is to understand the […]
Here is a story that can save you money. It might even save your life. If we could see all of the organisms that surround us, we would see microbes, billions of them, many kinds of viruses, bacteria, fungi and archaea. Most of them do nothing to us. Some could help us. Others, if they […]
You likely do not often think about how you are put together on a microscopic scale. You are a conspiracy of cells. Roughly a hundred trillion of them, each one more or less autonomous. Each shapes its environment (you) by talking to co-conspirators. Cells do this instinctively. Their ancestors survived by doing it for millions […]
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom. So says J.R.R. Tolkien’s hero-wizard, Gandalf, to Saruman (an anti-hero wizard). More than a century of successful atom smashing seems to say that Gandalf got this wrong. But let’s take a closer look at what we have—and what we […]