Are Babies Born Good?

Researching the moral decisions of infants:

“The study of babies and young toddlers is a perplexing business. Even the most perceptive observers can be tempted to see what isn’t there. ‘When our infant was only four months old I thought that he tried to imitate sounds; but I may have deceived myself,’ Charles Darwin wrote in ‘A Biographical Sketch of an Infant,’ his classic study of his own son. Babies don’t reliably control their bodies or communicate well, if at all, so their opinions can’t be solicited through ordinary means. Instead, researchers outfit them with miniature wire skullcaps to monitor their brain waves, scrutinize them like shoplifters through video cameras and two-way mirrors, and conduct exceedingly clever and tightly controlled experiments, which a good portion of their subjects will refuse to sit through anyway. Even well-behaved babies are notoriously tough to read: Their most meditative expressions are often the sign of an impending bowel movement.”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Dec 24, 2012
Length: 19 minutes (4,817 words)

Pardis Sabeti, the Rollerblading Rock Star Scientist of Harvard

On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics:

“There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human history and for medicine.’ For the first time, researchers could look for evidence of positive selection by testing common haplotypes even if they didn’t have ‘prior knowledge of a specific variant or selective advantage.’ By applying this approach to pathogens, there was the possibility of identifying how diseases had evolved to outwit the human immune response or develop drug resistance—knowledge that would open up new avenues to combating disease.

“All of a sudden, the previously unknown 26-year-old was a superstar. David Hafler, a Yale neurologist and immunobiologist who has worked with Sabeti, compares her approach to that of a preternaturally gifted athlete, the hockey great Wayne Gretzky. ‘He was asked, ‘Why are you always where the action is?’ And he responded, ‘I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where the puck is going to be.’ That’s the reason she’s able to make all of these fundamental contributions.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Nov 20, 2012
Length: 11 minutes (2,962 words)

The Great New England Vampire Panic

How 19th Century American farmers became convinced that dead relatives could rise from their graves and feed on them as vampires:

“The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. ‘It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,’ Bellantoni recalls.

“Subsequent analysis showed that the beheading, along with other injuries, including rib fractures, occurred roughly five years after death. Somebody had also smashed the coffin.

“The other skeletons in the gravel hillside were packaged for reburial, but not ‘J.B.,’ as the 50ish male skeleton from the 1830s came to be called, because of the initials spelled out in brass tacks on his coffin lid. He was shipped to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, in Washington, D.C., for further study. Meanwhile, Bellantoni started networking. He invited archaeologists and historians to tour the excavation, soliciting theories. Simple vandalism seemed unlikely, as did robbery, because of the lack of valuables at the site.

“Finally, one colleague asked: ‘Ever heard of the Jewett City vampires?'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Sep 21, 2012
Length: 20 minutes (5,198 words)

The Inside Story of a Controversial New Text About Jesus

Inside Harvard historian Karen King’s discovery of an ancient papyrus fragment that includes the phrase, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife'”:

“What it does seem to reveal is more subtle and complex: that some group of early Christians drew spiritual strength from portraying the man whose teachings they followed as having a wife. And not just any wife, but possibly Mary Magdalene, the most-mentioned woman in the New Testament besides Jesus’ mother.

“The question the discovery raises, King told me, is, ‘Why is it that only the literature that said he was celibate survived? And all of the texts that showed he had an intimate relationship with Magdalene or is married didn’t survive? Is that 100 percent happenstance? Or is it because of the fact that celibacy becomes the ideal for Christianity?’

“How this small fragment figures into longstanding Christian debates about marriage and sexuality is likely to be a subject of intense debate. Because chemical tests of its ink have not yet been run, the papyrus is also apt to be challenged on the basis of authenticity; King herself emphasizes that her theories about the text’s significance are based on the assumption that the fragment is genuine, a question that has by no means been definitively settled. That her article’s publication will be seen at least in part as a provocation is clear from the title King has given the text: ‘The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Sep 18, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,366 words)

How the Pogo Stick Leapt From Classic Toy to Extreme Sport

How timing and creativity can reignite interest in a toy:

“Not long ago, three inventors—toiling at home, unaware of one another’s existence—set out to reimagine the pogo. What was so sacred about that ungainly steel coil? they wondered. Why couldn’t you make a pogo stick brawny enough for a 250-pound adult? And why not vault riders a few feet, instead of measly inches? If athletes were pulling ‘big air’ on skateboards, snowboards and BMX bikes, why couldn’t the pogo stick be just as, well, gnarly?

“When I reached one of the inventors, Bruce Middleton—who studied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and describes himself as an ‘outcast scientist’—he told me that the problem had been a ‘conceptual basin.'”

“‘Normal people, someone tells them a pogo stick is a thing with steel springs, they go, “That’s right,”‘ Middleton said. ‘If that’s your basin, you’ll never come up with a very good pogo. An inventor is someone who recognizes the existence of a conceptual basin and sees that there’s a world outside the basin.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Aug 21, 2012
Length: 18 minutes (4,508 words)

Quite Likely the Worst Job Ever

Inside 19th Century London’s sewers with “toshers,” who made a living by scouring for trash and waste to be resold:

“They were mostly celebrated, nonetheless, for the living that the sewers gave them, which was enough to support a tribe of around 200 men–each of them known only by his nickname: Lanky Bill, Long Tom, One-eyed George, Short-armed Jack. The toshers earned a decent living; according to Mayhew’s informants, an average of six shillings a day–an amount equivalent to about $50 today. It was sufficient to rank them among the aristocracy of the working class–and, as the astonished writer noted, ‘at this rate, the property recovered from the sewers of London would have amounted to no less than £20,000 [today $3.3 million] per annum.'”

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 12 minutes (3,178 words)

The Little-Known History of How the Modern Olympics Got Their Start

Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events:

“Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the moral, physical and intellectual improvement of the inhabitants’ of Wenlock. However, notwithstanding this high-minded purpose, and unlike the sanctimonious claptrap that suffocates the Games today, Penny Brookes also knew how to put a smile on the Olympic face. His annual Much Wenlock games had the breezy ambience of a medieval county fair. The parade to the ‘Olympian Fields’ began, appropriately, at the two taverns in town, accompanied by heralds and bands, with children singing, gaily tossing flower petals. The winners were crowned with laurel wreaths, laid on by the begowned fairest of Much Wenlock’s fair maids. Besides the classic Greek fare, the competitions themselves tended to the eclectic. One year there was a blindfolded wheelbarrow race, another offered ‘an old woman’s race for a pound of tea’ and on yet another occasion there was a pig chase, with the intrepid swine squealing past the town’s limestone cottages until cornered ‘in the cellar of Mr. Blakeway’s house.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 29, 2012
Length: 25 minutes (6,278 words)

The Ax Murderer Who Got Away

On June 10, 1912, a family was brutally murdered in a small Iowa town. The murders remain unsolved:

“The Moores were not discovered until several hours later, when a neighbor, worried by the absence of any sign of life in the normally boisterous household, telephoned Joe’s brother, Ross, and asked him to investigate. Ross found a key on his chain that opened the front door, but barely entered the house before he came rushing out again, calling for Villisca’s marshal, Hank Horton. That set in train a sequence of events that destroyed what little hope there may have been of gathering useful evidence from the crime scene. Horton brought along Drs. J. Clark Cooper and Edgar Hough and Wesley Ewing, the minister of the Moore’s Presbyterian congregation. They were followed by the county coroner, L.A. Linquist, a third doctor, F.S. Williams (who became the first to examine the bodies and estimate a time of death). When a shaken Dr Williams emerged, he cautioned members of the growing crowd outside: ‘Don’t go in there, boys; you’ll regret it until the last day of your life.’ Many ignored the advice; as many as 100 curious neighbors and townspeople tramped as they pleased through the house, scattering fingerprints, and in one case even removing fragments of Joe Moore’s skull as a macabre keepsake.”

Author: Mike Dash
Source: Smithsonian
Published: Jun 8, 2012
Length: 13 minutes (3,458 words)

How the Chicken Conquered the World

A history of how chickens went from the jungle to dinner tables all around the world:

“Europeans arriving in North America found a continent teeming with native turkeys and ducks for the plucking and eating. Some archaeologists believe that chickens were first introduced to the New World by Polynesians who reached the Pacific coast of South America a century or so before the voyages of Columbus. Well into the 20th century, chickens, although valued, particularly as a source of eggs, played a relatively minor role in the American diet and economy. Long after cattle and hogs had entered the industrial age of centralized, mechanized slaughterhouses, chicken production was still mostly a casual, local enterprise. The breakthrough that made today’s quarter-million-bird farms possible was the fortification of feed with antibiotics and vitamins, which allowed chickens to be raised indoors. Like most animals, chickens need sunlight to synthesize vitamin D on their own, and so up through the first decades of the 20th century, they typically spent their days wandering around the barnyard, pecking for food. Now they could be sheltered from weather and predators and fed a controlled diet in an environment designed to present the minimum of distractions from the essential business of eating. Factory farming represents the chicken’s final step in its transformation into a protein-producing commodity. Hens are packed so tightly into wire cages (less than half a square foot per bird) that they can’t spread their wings; as many as 20,000 to 30,000 broilers are crowded together in windowless buildings.”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: May 22, 2012
Length: 16 minutes (4,204 words)

Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Attack

Clarke, who served three presidents as counterterrorism czar, believes that the United States was probably behind the cyberattack on Iran—and the U.S. is now vulnerable to having it turned back against it:

“‘I think it’s pretty clear that the United States government did the Stuxnet attack,’ he said calmly.

“This is a fairly astonishing statement from someone in his position.

“‘Alone or with Israel?’ I asked.

“‘I think there was some minor Israeli role in it. Israel might have provided a test bed, for example. But I think that the U.S. government did the attack and I think that the attack proved what I was saying in the book [which came out before the attack was known], which is that you can cause real devices—real hardware in the world, in real space, not cyberspace—to blow up.'”

Source: Smithsonian
Published: Mar 28, 2012
Length: 9 minutes (2,491 words)