Rocks are full of stories. They contain the petrified remains of long-dead animals and in every fossilised bone, scale and track, there are awe-inspiring accounts of the history of life on this planet. Of course, fossils themselves are poor narrators. To uncover their tales, you need a storyteller with an expert’s knowledge and a writer’s flair. Brian Switek is that storyteller.
In his first book, Written in Stone, Switek uses the remains of prehistoric creatures to illustrate how th ...read more
A few weeks ago when I posted on the results of a high likelihood of a partially eastern origin for the Mundari people I received a message via Facebook that the article really wasn’t relevant to most South Asians, since only 1-2% spoke a Mundari language (along with pointers to old out of date articles). I immediately replied that it is likely that the Mundari were one of the base populations from which the Indo-Aryan speaking peoples of Bengal, Orissa and Assam arose. The Santals ar ...read more
Whenever you recognize someone or something–your mother, the Space Needle, an iguana–it’s because certain neurons in your brain light up with activity almost exclusively in response to that one thing. You may pretend you don’t know who Heidi Montag is, but somewhere in your gray matter, your brain cells are proving you wrong. Researchers at CalTech used this principle to create a spooky game in which subjects manipulated a computer screen with their minds.
The research, l ...read more
