There is a particular kind of sentence that means nothing the first time you read it, and then, years later, on an ordinary afternoon, means almost everything.
Everyone you love lives on less than a pixel There is a photograph people reach for whenever they have just lost an argument, a job, or their nerve.
Quote source: A traceable published instance appears in the 2016 Caltech Community Science Academy program; the original occasion is not established here.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, oil companies conducting exploratory drilling off the East Coast of the United States occasionally produced an unexpected and somewhat inconvenient result.
The standard cultural framing of where human creativity comes from has, on the available evidence, been organized around a particular implicit assumption.
The standard cultural framing of where life on Earth originated has, for most of the last several decades, focused on a particular set of candidate environments.
The mainstream scientific framing of consciousness has been, for most of the last century, calibrated to a particular assumption.
The wider cultural register has, on the available evidence, a particular list of films that it tends to associate with realistic depictions of space.
A new species of marine reptile, identified from fossils that have been sitting in various museum collections in North Texas and elsewhere for as long as…
The standard cultural framing of where animal life originated has, for most of the last century, placed the origin in shallow water.
Correction, September 20, 2026: The headline and opening were revised to identify the measured liver-cell chromatin endpoint rather than describing it as reversal of 80% of aging in elderly mice.
The cosmos, in any honest accounting, is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we are in it.
The human skeleton is, on every available physiological measurement, considerably more dynamic than the standard cultural framing tends to credit.
Carl Sagan used this line in Cosmos (1980). The line has, since his death, become one of those quotes that floats around the internet attached to photographs…
Quote source: Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, episode “Messengers” (2011).
I want to write about something slightly embarrassing, partly because it is true, and partly because the path out of the belief was, in my case, a particular piece of evidence that I have not, in the years since, ever heard a conspiracy debunker bring up.
