Author: Charles Pineda

What I learned trying to keep up with my 4-year-old daughter at the royal game.

Jill Viles, an Iowa mother, was born with a rare type of muscular dystrophy. The symptoms weren’t really noticeable until preschool, when she began to fall while walking. She saw doctors, but they couldn’t diagnose her or supply a remedy. When she left for college, she was 5-foot-3 and weighed just 87 pounds. How she […]

Our veins are swimming with immune cells of many different kinds. Some bear the memory of previous infections, in case we should encounter them again; some are actively fighting invaders; others are merely on the look-out. Counting all of the varieties of cells and what molecules they are producing gives researchers a profile of someone’s […]

Before Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of […]

Improving the lives of disabled people is more than an engineering project.

Richard Loveless believes trans-disciplinary collaborations can inspire creativity and pioneer new ways of thinking. That’s why, in 1991, he became the founding Director of the Institute for Studies in the Arts, a premiere arts research group in the College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University. During his nine-year tenure, he’s funded over 200 projects […]

At the height of his powers in 15th century Florence, Lorenzo de Medici managed to secure a magnificent giraffe for his menagerie. The animal was such a marvel that several works of art depicted its arrival. (Just how grueling and gruesome the transit must have been to the giraffe is lost to history.) For ages, […]

One girl’s scientific coming of age.

When I was at the Firefly Music Festival in Delaware, in the summer of 2014, I took a 200 mg pill of ecstasy—Red Riddler—something I had done before. After the sets were over, the colors of the overhead lamps seemed more saturated against the sky. Each bulb’s top-right quadrant had a massive, prismatic aura, like […]

Kirk Johnson’s mom gave him 5 minutes at a rest stop. It was enough to find an arrowhead.