After linguist Philip Seargeant’s grandmother suffered a stroke, her thoughts remained trapped in her body. Although she had no cognitive damage, her paralysed muscles didn’t allow her to speak or write. To communicate, she would
Anyone who has crossed a busy road in a metropolis without well-regulated traffic, in say Mumbai, India, can understand the plight of a deer trying to cross a two-lane highway, in rural United States.
The gods created scents; humans make perfumes. Naked and frail, they survive only by artifice (trickery). Jean Giono In the late 1960s, Jean-Claude Ellena, an apprentice perfumer in France, tried to reproduce Eau
One day in 1997, University of Pennsylvania molecular biologist Katalin (Kati) Karikó met a new hire at the photocopier who would change the trajectory of her research forever. At 42, the scientist had made
At the pediatrician’s clinic, a nurse told Viorica Marian, who is a native speaker of Romanian, to use only English with her American-born daughter. Speaking another language would “confuse” the child and hurt her long-term,
Ashley Jean Yeager VERA RUBIN began her career at a time when women were denied access to telescopes at leading observatories. Eventually her work helped scientists rethink the content of the cosmos. In Bright Galaxies, Dark