Author: Anthony Mariano

Lucas’ droids are halfway between human and inhuman, so we can both love and ignore them.

Why we shouldn’t worry about leaving print behind.

Tim Melling/Getty Images The Arctic they grew up in is unrecognizable, but bowhead whales are oddly calm. They appear to be unexpectedly benefitting from the warmer, less icy climate that has emerged over the past decade. Last month, it was announced that the Arctic in 2015 reached the warmest temperatures ever observed, and that it is warming twice as […]

Hill Street Studios/Getty Images When children grow up in poverty, their brains can take a different shape. That’s one of the stark and uncomfortable findings from the lab of Kimberly Noble, a pediatrician and cognitive neuroscientist at Teachers College, Columbia University. Noble has used MRI scans to study the brains of children and found that […]

Social media encourages us to follow those we envy.

Black Beauty: The supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy, around 11 million light years away toward the constellation Centaurus, is currently classified as a quasar. It is roughly 55 million times more massive than our Sun. Its collimated jets, in blue, surpass the diameter of the entire galaxy, extending up to 13,000 […]

If our particles have no identity, how can we?

My wife can’t seem to walk for a half-hour around Ottawa, a city with nearly a million people, without running into at least three of her friends. Some people, like my wife, seem to have a zillion of them, while others appear to be content with just a handful. Having more friends seems like a […]

Warriors among the Kwara’ae, a collection of tribal communities indigenous to the Solomon Islands, sacrificed pigs before battle. The tradition granted the combatants, so the belief went, aid from heroic ancestral spirits—like the mighty A’orama, a fierce fighter in Kwara’ae folklore. For every man who prepared to shed blood, a hog met its end.1 Any […]

A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology once said, “If somebody sneezed on [the] kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong.” He was referring to a cylinder, sometimes called Le Grand K, which is housed in a vault in Paris and handled like a priceless gem. The […]