Ice cemeteries: A market for resurrection, from metaphysics to physics
"Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality." This is the sentence French biologist and philosopher Jean Rostand (son of the writer Edmond de Rostand) used to begin the preface of a book on cryonics, The Prospect of Immortality, by the physics professor and science fiction writer Robert C. W. Ettinger.
Codependency: a concept too widely used to have a single definition
A word is dead when it is said, some say. I say it just begins to live that day. – Emily Dickinson
Revelations from the morning pages
I am 33 years old, married and have a two-year-old daughter. It is great to be a mother and see how beautifully we were created. I was fascinated by pregnancy, I am still interested in the subject of natural births and I try to research as thoroughly as possible each stage we are going through.
A single stomach—and plenty of reasons not to stuff it
What would it be like to eat 8,6 kilograms of food in a single meal? Although it seems absurd to try and fit so much food into one’s stomach, a 23-year old model from London conducted just such an experiment in 1981.
The small sample and the slender majority
In scientific research, sampling is the primary method used when research cannot be conducted on a one-to-one scale. The facts discovered at the level of the sample are presumed to apply in general.
The rule of law
For the average punter, rugby league had its beginnings in a school at Rugby, England, when one William Webb Ellis, “with fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time at Rugby school, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it, thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game.”
COVID-19: Crisis prayer and the crisis of our prayers
I was descending from Omu Peak, in the Bucegi Mountains, with a few dozen young people. It had not been an ideal hike, and we were behind schedule. The forest made the darkness even thicker as it began to cover the mountain, and slowly, our minds as well.
The fragility of the good news about COVID-19 mortality
The mortality rate of COVID-19 remains high, but not as high as its transmission rate, and this good news needs nuances and explanations.
Misunderstanding a “memorable misunderstanding”
The spontaneous generation of life on Earth is as likely as a whirlwind putting a Boeing 747 together using scattered spare parts in a junkyard.
Pollution in our own homes is as dangerous as outdoor pollution
Air pollution is the greatest risk factor for both the environment and human health, according to the World Health Organization.
Religion is harmful. True or false?
The idea that religion is harmful to the process of human development has no scientific support, but religious conviction has been associated with a number of tragic experiences within families.
COVID-19: Hope overcomes the fear of the unknown
In the spring of 1936, the members of the Lykov family made a decision that would change their lives forever: they disappeared into the Siberian taiga, completely isolating themselves from the world for the next 40 years.
Beauty in brokenness
Amy Ainsworth is the mother of 5-year-old twin girls, whose appearance is both surprising and fascinating – how could it be any other way when you see a pair of big green eyes showing off from behind the brown curls of one of the girls, contrasting strikingly with the coffee-coloured eyes and black, straight hair of her twin sister?
Return to meaning
"To feel that you have meaning is to feel immortal," psychology professor and author Clay Routledge wrote in 2014. Is this the only kind of immortality we will ever have?
Snail racing: The strange social dynamics dictated by social networks
Social interactions and the tools that facilitate them are changing the world in ways that even now, after all this time, we cannot anticipate.