Iceland is known to the rest of the world as the land of Vikings and volcanos, an island caught between continents at the extremities of the map. Remote and comparatively inhospitable, it was settled only as long ago as the 9th century, and has seen little additional in-migration since. Even today, more than 90 percent […]

Located 350 km (217 miles) southeast of Puerto Rico, the British island of Montserrat is sometimes called ‘The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean’ for its verdancy and early Irish settlers. However, far from a paradise, Montserrat also boasts an unfortunate history, and not just because of the British slave trade that brutally ensnared many ancestors […]

One of the most dramatic surgical procedures still performed on human patients is the hemispherectomy, or the removal or disabling of half of the brain. It is a last-resort strategy often used to put an end to severe seizures; for 75 percent of the patients, the seizures stop entirely following the surgery. Most of the […]

Sign languages rely on the use of space (locations, motions, and handshapes) to express meaning or grammatical nuance, or both. This use of space for the sake of language is neurologically distinct from spatial processing in general; in fact, it appears to be located in the opposite hemisphere of the brain. A team of California […]

In the midst of World War II, the British Air Ministry began publicly extolling the virtues of carrot-eating. The vitamin A from these vegetables was improving pilots’ eyesight considerably, the ministry claimed, allowing flyers to spot enemy planes from greater distances and at night. Newspapers regurgitated these reports of strategic root vegetable consumption, and indeed, […]

Paris, 29 May 1832. All through the night, a young Frenchman named Évariste Galois stayed awake, quill in hand, frantically scrawling notes and equations across dozens of sheets of paper. He had only been studying mathematics seriously for a few years, but he had proven to be a veritable prodigy. After quickly exhausting the knowledge […]

When the two trailblazers of animated film finally met in 1941, the one named Walt Disney was quickly becoming a legend. The other, an Argentine named Quirino Cristiani, was on an equal but opposite trajectory toward obscurity. Despite their different upbringings, the two men were attracted to film in similar ways. For each of them, […]

Only one fictional character has ever been honoured with a front-page obituary in The New York Times: Hercule Poirot, one of Agatha Christie’s two recurring detectives. On 06 August 1975, the headline read, “Hercule Poirot Is Dead; Famed Belgian Detective”. Two months later, the last Poirot mystery – Curtain – was released to the public. […]

A lengthy study of ‘crack babies’ born to cocaine addicts in Philadelphia in the 1980s and 1990s ended in 2013 with an unexpected result. The average IQ amongst the ‘crack babies’ now in their early 20s was 79.0. However, the control group, who were socioeconomically similar but not born to crack addicts, had an average […]

Ancient Israel was renowned for its date palm plants, which were widespread in thick forests and reportedly bore delicious fruit. The dates were a staple food for dwellers of the Judaean Desert. Sometime around the year 1300, however, a confluence of catastrophes–agricultural, economic, and climatological–killed many of the trees, and over time the palms became […]