Margaret Wertheim

In the spring of 1872, a man stopped time. The arresting instrument was a simple camera, with which Eadweard Muybridge photographed a trotting horse. Within the frame of this legendary image, Muybridge captured the sliver of a moment when all four of the animal's feet were off the ground, thereby......

In the rivers of the Amazon jungle swims a fish that could hardly be more alien. Living in extremely murky water, this creature would have little use for conventional eyes, and has evolved instead a way of sensing by emitting an electric field. In effect, it "sees" the world through......

Photo by Debra DiPaolo Just before noon on a crisp spring day, Jim Gimzewski is looking a little rusty around the edges. Walking across the UCLA campus, he stops to cadge a cigarette from a couple of students deep in conversation. It's one thing to light up in the land......

Illustration by Dana Collins TO MOST OF US, INFINITY LOOMS AS THE END OF the mathematical affair, the final and ineffable conclusion of a process that begins with the articulation of one, two, three. Infinity is the number that cannot be enumerated, the enigma lurking in the ellipses . ......

Illustration by Dana Collins NO LESS A SOURCE THAN PICASSO OPINED THAT van Gogh was a man to be deeply envied; with his seminal painting of a pair of old boots the lobeless Dutch artist had discovered a new kind of subject — the utterly mundane. Scientists also long to......

When does a human embryo become a human being? For right-to-lifers the answer is unequivocal: at the moment of conception. And this idea, that a person comes into being as soon as an egg and a sperm fuse, is the platform on which Christian conservatives are building their case against......

Illustration by Dana Collins WHEN YOU WAKE UP IN THE MORNING, HOW DO YOU know who you are? The question has derailed philosophers, neuroscientists and artificial-intelligence researchers alike, but for kids on the playground, my sister Christine and I gave concrete urgency to the dilemma. As identical twins, how did......

For more than a decade, the curatorial staff at the Museum of Jurassic Technology has been charting the geography of that interstitial zone between being and not being. Housed behind an unprepossessing facade in Culver City, situated in a block that seems an imminent candidate for redevelopment, the MJT might......

Illustration by Dana Collins THE GREAT HUNGARIAN NUMBER THEORIST PAUL Erdös famously remarked that a mathematician is merely a machine for turning coffee into theorems. Erdös (pronounced air-dosh) was one of the most prolific mathematicians of all time, with over 1,500 papers to his name when he passed away in......

Illustration by Dana Collins AS THE OLD RUSSIAN SAYING GOES, IF YOU WAKE up and you're not in pain, it's because you are dead. Life can be tough. And judging by the statistics on depression it's getting tougher. Each year, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 19 million......