“I see myself as a translator who translates science into a language that someone like me, a literature major, can understand,” said New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert during a recent talk on campus. “Science tends to be written in a very different language, one that non-scientists can’t relate to, a language that isn’t even English.” (more…)
Expressing your emotions can reduce fear, UCLA psychologists report
“Give sorrow words.”
—Malcolm in Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”
Can simply describing your feelings at stressful times make you less afraid and less anxious?
A new UCLA psychology study suggests that labeling your emotions at the precise moment you are confronting what you fear can indeed have that effect.
The psychologists asked 88 people with a fear of spiders to approach a large, live tarantula in an open container outdoors. The participants were told to walk closer and closer to the spider and eventually touch it if they could. (more…)
The size and shape of the human cerebral cortex, an evolutionary marvel responsible for everything from Shakespeare’s poetry to the atomic bomb, are largely influenced by mutations in a single gene, according to a team of researchers led by the Yale School of Medicine and three other universities.
The findings, reported April 28 in the American Journal of Human Genetics, are based on a genetic analysis of in one Turkish family and two Pakistani families with offspring born with the most severe form of microcephaly. The children have brains just 10 percent of normal size. They also lacked the normal cortical architecture that is a hallmark of the human brain. This combination of factors has not been seen in other genes associated with the development of the human brain, the authors note. (more…)
The History Channel will air a new view of William Shakespeare on “Death Masks” Sept. 13, according to the Daily Mail.
If you have little money and fewer connections but you are a Writer, you have chances to spend some classic days (or even months) in this famous bookshop of
