A wonderful book! The book's main character is a scientist, an expert on diseases affecting eyes, who becomes fascinated by jellyfish. (They do have eyes…very complex eyes!) The book is interesting on many levels: the value of basic scientific research; the pressure to link research to medical advances in order to obtain funding, and the [...]
Figure 1. Cubozoan visual system.The visual system of the cubozoan Tripedalia cystophora (A) comprises four sensory structures called rhopalia (B). Each rhopalium carries six eyes of four morphological types (lower lens eye LLE, upper lens eye ULE, pit eye PE and slit eye SE) and a light sensitive neuropil (NP, red broken line). The [...]
After the Japanese collector and entrepreneur Yusaku Maezawa bought Jean-Michel Basquiat’s skull painting for $110.5 million at Sotheby’s auction the other day (the same picture sold for $19,000 in 1984!), he proudly posted on his Instagram account, “I am happy to announce that I just won this masterpiece. When I first encountered this painting, I [...]
Among my pet peeves is the commonly accepted notion that creativity slips away with age. What pressure that puts on the first half of life! Imagine that you’re 40, still young. Are you really in the eighth inning – okay, the seventh – of an imaginary baseball game? Social pressure compounds the idea that creativity [...]
On April 22, Earth Day, I joined thousands of frustrated people marching for science from the Washington Monument to the Capitol. This was my second protest march this year, the first being for Women’s March the day after Trump’s inauguration. The rain didn’t keep anyone away. To my eye there were thousands marching, holding [...]
In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, the protagonist of Stephen Greenblatt’s remarkable book, The Swerve, discovered a poem, On the Nature of Things, written 1,500 years earlier by Titus Lucretius Carus (99 BCE – 55 BCE), who was virtually unknown. This poem is his only surviving work. One might think that Poggio’s discovery of a new author from [...]
