Author: Charles Humphreys

I bet when you woke up this morning, even before you opened your eyes, you knew where all of your limbs were. You didn’t have to look at, or try moving them, to feel their presence. This is because you have the power of proprioception (it’s also sometimes called “kinesthesis”). Because it’s a sense, just […]

Fan riots are sparked by terrible insights that the Grim Reaper is winning.

It takes a bird brain to play contact sports safely.

The storied career of the centenarian and acoustician, Leo Beranek.

Once, I dreamed I was at a man’s funeral. According to the deceased’s instructions, each of his toes were to be buried in tiny, individual coffins. When I woke up, I wondered, “What could it mean?” According to some neuroscience research on dreams, like that of the Harvard psychiatrist Allan Hobson, the coffined toes might […]

The visual playfulness of Simen Johan.

A handful of underfunded researchers still believe science can defy the odds.

The environmental artist Ned Kahn, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” awardee, gravitates toward phenomena that lie on the edges of what science can grasp—“things,” he tells me over the phone, “that are inherently complex and difficult to predict, yet at the same time beautiful.” The weather, for example, has, because of its chaotic yet orderly […]

Our sense of smell may have evolved to detect danger, not beauty.

As someone so flummoxed by traffic I wrote a book about it, I have a near-clinical aversion to vehicular congestion. My global default strategy is to simply drive as little as possible, but there are times when I simply must put foot to gas pedal. Like many, I have become increasingly dependent on the Waze […]