In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson wheeled his chair between two PDP-10 mainframes at BBN in Cambridge and sent the first message between computers on ARPANET, choosing the @ symbol because no one's name would ever contain it.
Long marriages ask something almost no one warns you about: the quiet grief of watching your partner slowly become someone only you remember the earlier version of. The couples who survive it don't refuse to notice the change — they metabolise it out loud.
A small observational study found associations between microbial diversity and some sleep measures; it could not establish that the microbiome causes better sleep.
Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic isopod that enters a fish through the gills, drinks the blood out of its tongue until the tongue withers away, and then attaches to the stub and spends the rest of its life acting as a functional replacement tongue — the only known case in biology of a parasite replacing a host organ.
In five days in April 1967, a 25-year-old history teacher in Palo Alto turned a classroom question about Nazi Germany into a movement of 200 students — using nothing more than posture rules, a salute, and the pleasure of being told what to do.
The prevailing story about AI in a disaster zone is that it belongs to governments and large NGOs: satellite imagery pipelines at FEMA, damage models at the World Bank, logistics dashboards at the UN. When twin earthquakes reportedly ripped through northern Venezuela last month, that story broke.
In 1973, when OPEC's oil embargo revealed how much of the industrialised world ran on Gulf petroleum, the region's monarchies discovered they had bought themselves a kind of leverage that money alone could not manufacture.
In 1936, a 23-year-old Cambridge graduate student named Alan Turing published a 36-page paper describing an imaginary tape reader to settle a question in mathematical logic — and inadvertently defined what a computer is.
In 1998, a Tufts psychologist named Raymond Nickerson published a long review article pulling together decades of scattered experiments under one heading.
Finland did build one of the world's most admired education systems around trust rather than constant inspection, competition and high-stakes testing.
What follows is reading and reflection on published psychology research, not advice.
Give someone five compliments and one insult in the same afternoon, and the insult is what they carry home.
