science | The Smart Set

Hot Springs and Sunk Costs

Spencer Fleury — Thu, 07 Sep 2023 16:18:46 +0000

The last afternoon of the conference I had no business attending was warm and sunny. Tailor-made for naps. Or a quick dip in a shimmering lake nearby. Or a hike along one of the wooded hillsides I could see from my hotel room’s window. Just outside, along the two-lane cobblestone street straddling a narrow median […]

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Questioning De-Extinction

Emma Wilkins — Thu, 08 Jun 2023 11:30:00 +0000

I came across a surprising claim the other day. Shortly after reading that in the last 200 years, Australia has suffered the largest documented decline in biodiversity of any continent, I read that my home state’s habitat has remained “relatively unchanged” since 1936. The quote was on a US biotech company’s website. Last year the […]

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To Mars and Beyond

Arvind Dilawar — Mon, 11 May 2020 11:30:16 +0000

As we bemoan the standing shelter-at-place orders due to the COVID-19 pandemic, consider: What if you were constrained to your home for months? For years? And without the delivery of food, clothing, or other necessities? What would you need to stockpile to survive and how would you fit it all into the limited space available? […]

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Detention & Despair

MK Menon — Mon, 09 Sep 2019 11:30:44 +0000

The cleanliness of the facility well surpassed my expectations considering the 100-plus children scattered around the various room. The woman with a toothy smile who greeted us tried coaxing my toddler away from me. He responded by clinging to my leg even harder. I decided to stay with him, trying to make him comfortable in […]

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In Vitro Impossible

Arvind Dilawar — Mon, 18 Feb 2019 12:30:00 +0000

Oron Catts’s most recent exhibition, Biomess, features a unique work of art. It’s a deconstructed incubator, inside of which live hybridoma cells — cells from distinct organisms that have been fused together by Catts and his longtime collaborator Ionat Zurr. The cells come from two different mice and, once fused, can only exist within the […]

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Hollow Words

Laura Leavitt — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 12:30:33 +0000

Sometimes, an idea can be so arresting that, for a time at least, we care more about the fascinating nature of the idea than we do about its feasibility or reality. This was how I felt when I discovered that one man (and a few others before and after him) firmly believed that the Earth […]

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Out of Thin Hair

Melinda Lewis — Fri, 21 Dec 2018 12:30:27 +0000

In early November, I received an event notification in my email: “Presidential Hair: A Close Shave with History.” Speaker Robert McCracken Peck, Academy Curator of Art and Artifacts and Senior Fellow, was going to provide insight into the hair collection of Peter A. Browne, the subject of his book Specimens of Hair: The Curious Collection […]

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Field Notes

Anne McGouran — Thu, 12 Jul 2018 13:36:28 +0000

A rising wall of snow-cloud and Canada geese flee the coming squall. From the sunroom at the back of my house I can track storms rolling in over the harbor. This winter, the impulse to step through that pane of glass hit me hard. There’s a magnetic force to Collingwood’s glinting harbor when it’s under […]

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Should We Stop Looking for Intelligent Life?

Joelle Renstrom — Mon, 21 May 2018 11:19:17 +0000

As the first asteroid confirmed to have originated outside the Solar System whizzed by at roughly 85,000 mph, scientists scrambled unsuccessfully to figure out some way to catch up to it. Was it different from the asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter? Was it even an asteroid? What if it was some kind […]

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The Security of Dirt

Paul Lindholdt — Mon, 19 Feb 2018 12:30:37 +0000

The young woman beside me on an airliner ready to head to France was nipping at her nails. Bells had begun to ping. Carbon particulates from overhead vents were besieging us and rendering us hyperaware of the air. She gnawed and nipped and peered through the porthole. From the seatback tray-table clasp, her pink jean […]

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