Early in Jules Verne’s’ “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Captain Nemo welcomes Pierre Aronnax, professor of natural history at the Paris Museum, aboard his submarine.
Biology
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Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash
Be mine, Valentine
What’s the story of love?”
Anopheles funestus • Photo by James Gathany, Dr. Frank Collins, University of Notre Dame (Public Domain)
The bite that binds
Humans and mosquitos share an ancestor in deep time. Our kinship is revealed at the level of the genes. Certainly, we are enough alike chemically so that human blood protein is useful to the mosquito.
The Eastern equine encephalitis virus (colored red) • Image by CDC (Public Domain)
Cell wars
Last week our part of southeastern Massachusetts was sprayed from the air with insecticide. The target: mosquitoes that carry the virus for Eastern equine encephalitis.
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That cottage of darkness
In many ways my mother’s funeral was a joyous occasion — a time to celebrate her life, to celebrate family. A time, too, to think about death.
Daphnia pulex • Photo by Paul Hebert (CC BY 2.5)
He fleas and she fleas
Has there ever been a more astute observer of the war between the sexes than James Thurber?
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Six impossible things
I can’t remember the first time I heard it said that there is an arm’s length of DNA in every cell of our bodies, but I am certain that I blinked with disbelief. How can an arm’s length of anything fit into a microscopically small volume?
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In search of the soul
The philosopher René Descartes insisted that body and soul are separate things. “I think, therefore I am,” he famously said. His “am” was not flesh and bone.
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An itch for God
More than a century ago the American psychologist William James set out to account for the universality of religious faith in “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” a book that maintains a lively presence on college reading lists.
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Free as a bird
All afternoon I have been watching a pair of hummingbirds play about our porch. They live somewhere nearby, though I haven’t found their nest. They are attracted to our hummingbird feeder, which we keep full of sugar water.