celebration against entropy

This may sound familiar: you are studying and your phone buzzes. At first, it is easy to stay focused, but as more time passes, it becomes much harder to ignore the distractions that surround you. The conflict between persisting in one task and moving onto another underlies much of our behavior. Our ability to maintain a behavior or a state of mind over time is affected by our internal state (our emotions and our mindfulness), t...

When Michael Stipe of the alternative band R.E.M. wrote, ‘sexuality isn’t just black and white, or simple—it is every shade and gradation of the rainbow,’ he very well could have been writing about the animal kingdom at large.

Sexual orientation is remarkably fluid—not just in humans, but in all kinds of animals [1]. Female bonobos, for instance, will lie on top of one another rubbing genitalia. Male Adelie penguins from Antarcti...

It’s no secret that modern society is obsessed with stopping the aging process. People get their grey hairs dyed, their tummies tucked, and even botox injected in their faces. While we may not be able to actually slow the aging process of our bodies, we spend countless amounts of money trying look younger than we are, and deluding ourselves into thinking that age does not apply to us. People crave eternal youth, and although the...

I arrive at home from work to find my five-year-old laying on the couch watching cartoons. Instantly I can tell he’s not himself. Usually when I walk through the door, he’ll run into my arms, raving about some exciting thing that happened in his day. But this time, he doesn’t even look my way. He lays there droopy, listless and dejected. It’s obvious that he’s sick.

It’s nothing remarkable to say that a person’s behavior can tell...

We all know the feeling: you settle in for a cozy Saturday morning of sleeping in after a long week of work. The blinds are shut, the alarm is off, and nothing is standing between you and the hours of sleep you crave, and then… you wake up. It’s 6 am, the time at which you force yourself to rise every Monday through Friday for a day at the office. The only thing you want to do is sleep in, but apparently, your brain didn’t get t...