Today, I listened to a story from Science Friday about sunscreen. It’s an interesting story: sunscreen use is on the rise, but so are cases of melanoma. Why? One idea, called the ‘compensation hypothesis’ is that sunscreen with high UVB but low UVA protection, stops sunburn and enables people to spend more time in the […]

Today’s horrific tragedy will undoubtedly spawn another round of news stories saying that this is the “Nth mass shooting,” or “it’s been N days since the last mass shooting in the U.S.” But many of them will give completely different numbers. When it comes to mass shootings, it can be hard to find good data—in […]

James L. Madara, MD, CEO of the American Medical Association (AMA), began his letter to the United States Senate poetically: “Medicine has long operated under the precept of Primum non nocere, or ‘first, do no harm.’ The draft legislation violates that standard on many levels.” The letter concludes more concretely: “We believe that Congress should […]

Loan words sometimes take on whole new meanings: for example the word ‘parka’ in Japan refers to a ‘hooded sweatshirt’ or ‘hoodie’ as opposed to the jacket commonly called a ‘parka’ in English: I’d be really curious to dig into the etymology of these kinds of words, and it’s probably fairly easy to trace their […]

The strong and simultaneous activation of both branches the autonomic nervous system, sympathetic and parasympathetic, is known as ‘autonomic conflict.’ In the cartoonish intro-biology view of the body, the sympathetic system fight or flight is an accelerator, the parasympathetic is pumping the breaks. (I always used to think parasympathetic = paramedics = ’rest and recover’.) […]

One nuance of language that I hadn’t considered before spending a year in Japan is how words for expressing categories sometimes don’t quite line up. For example, in Japanese ‘juusu’ or juice refers not just to fruit and vegetable juices, but also soft-drinks. But what’s more, the line between fruits and vegetables itself is different, […]

When Chris Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University, was trying to choose a textbook for his introductory psychology course, he realized his own field of study, video game violence was being misportrayed in some textbooks. “The data isn’t consistent or clear,” said Fergusen, but textbooks were picking sides and trying to portray it like it […]

As an intern at Gimlet Media’s Science Vs, I’ve learned a lot about making podcasts. The process of making a podcast can seem mysterious, if not impossible. And when it comes to tasks like finding the overall structuring of a story or selecting the very best audio from three-hour-long interviews, if you’re like me, you may be […]

Learning a new language can seem impossible, especially later in life, but it’s not–in fact, language learning is something our brains specially evolved to do! In this post I’ll share why why language learning is fascinating from a neuroscience perspective, my experience learning Japanese from scratch at twenty-eight, and end with three tricks for self-study […]

First off, if you’re experiencing the worst headache of your life, please stop reading and head to an emergency room, especially if it’s onset was sudden. Alright, moving on: I’ll start with a personal story and get to the studies, below. Feel free to skip ahead. I was thirteen, in English class and struggling to […]