The decent moderation of today will be the least of human things tomorrow. At the time of the Spanish Inquisition, the opinion of good sense and of the good medium was certainly that people ought not to burn too large a number of heretics; extreme and unreasonable opinion obviously demanded that they should burn none at all.
-Maurice Maeterlinck, poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate (29 Aug 1862-1949)
Many people take no care of their money till they come nearly to the end of it, and others do just the same with their time.
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (28 Aug 1749-1832)
Believing Myths About Aging Makes Growing Old Worse
When it comes to how the brain changes over time, the news isn’t all bad. In fact, research now shows that our later years are a new stage of adult development, where three profound and positive changes take place in the brain.
First, certain genes activate only by experience, which means the brain remodels itself over time, adding depth and wisdom to our personalities.
Second, the brain learns to recruit regions underutilized in our earlier years, and this can help compensate for the cognitive decline that comes with age. Put differently, when we’re younger, one hemisphere of the brain might be entirely responsible for a particular type of information processing, but as we age, the brain recruits areas in the other hemisphere, which is a kind of neural redundancy that can offset age-related decline.
Third, the brain’s information processing capacities reach their greatest density and height between ages sixty and eighty, allowing the two hemispheres of the brain to work together like never before.
The world is changed by your example, not your opinion.
-Paulo Coelho, novelist (b. 24 Aug 1947)
‘Large’ creature — with 20 arms — found lurking in Antarctic sea. It’s a new species
Scientists aboard a research vessel near Antarctica pulled their nets out of the chilly ocean water. Among their catch, they found a 20-armed creature with a distinctive body shape. It’s a new species...
Interview: Treating Gun Violence as a Public Health Crisis
Undark: The United States has a high rate of gun violence and gun deaths compared to other industrialized countries. Why?
David Hemenway: The big reason is the guns and the gun laws. Evidence indicates that we are really an average high-income country in terms of non-gun violence and crime. So if you look at our overall rates of burglary, or robbery, or sexual assault, or car theft, we do better than some of the other high-income countries and we do worse than others...
Ever Wonder How Drugs Are Named? Read On
If a compound shows enough promise to make it through early experiments and head towards clinical trials, two naming processes begin to devise a generic name and a brand name for the future drug.
The unsurprising confusion about ‘per capita’
A car cut me off on the highway the other day. The car was going nearly 100 mph.
Was the car a new Porsche 911 GT3 or a used Toyota Camry?
The thing is, there are more than 1,000 times as many Camrys on the road. But our instinct is to pick the vivid and distinctive answer.
The per capita crime rate in rural areas is often dramatically (sometimes five or ten times) higher than it is in most cities...
Eminent posts make great men greater, and little men less.
-Jean de La Bruyere, essayist and moralist (16 Aug 1645-1696)
A matrioshka brain[1][2] is a hypothetical megastructure of immense computational capacity powered by a Dyson sphere. It was proposed in 1997 by Robert J. Bradbury (1956–2011[3]). It is an example of a class-B stellar engine, employing the entire energy output of a star to drive computer systems.[4] This concept derives its name from the nesting Russian matryoshka dolls.[5] The concept was deployed by Bradbury in the anthology Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.[6][7]
Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
-Russell Baker, columnist and author (14 Aug 1925-2019)
The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive, and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered.
-Jean Piaget, psychologist (9 Aug 1896-1980)
No amount of belief makes something a fact.
-James Randi, magician and skeptic (b. 7 Aug 1928)
The world is changed not by the self-regarding, but by men and women prepared to make fools of themselves.
-P.D. James, novelist (3 Aug 1920-2014)
You think your pains and heartbreaks are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who have ever been alive.
-James Baldwin, writer (2 Aug 1924-1987)
