When I was a youngster, I was both repelled and fascinated by skeletons and the remains of the dead. While bones will always retain a tinge of horror, anguish, revulsion, and all the associations of graveyards and slasher-movie screams, I also now find a beauty and magnetic charisma to their naked simplicity and inferred motion.

Fossils and trips to museums helped to pry skeletons away from the realm of night-terrors, towards a sedate landscape of appreciation and admiration for the rhythms of anatomy. …

Jeff Bridges — New S**T has come to light

Just so we’re clear, that handsome middle aged duuude is not me. That is The Dude. Jeff Bridges. And he (as The Dude) is my profile photo. If you have not seen The Big Lebowski, starring Jeffrey Leon Bridges as The Dude, you have to check it out. Bridges is not only an inspiration for my Medium persona, but also for checking out the disease he has just been diagnosed with.

I first saw Bridges in Starman, for which he earned an Academy Award nomination. I saw it at that impressionable age where the young brain stores profoundly useless items…

“…whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.” — C. Darwin

Working backwards to the origin of life…

William F. Martin, Ph.D. is a former carpenter, born in Bethesda, Maryland, educated in Texas, who after hammering nails in Dallas moved to Hanover, Germany to get his degree in biology, and then to the Max-Planck Institute in Cologne for his Ph.D.

In July 2016, Madeline Weiss et al. from Martin’s lab published a paper in Nature Microbiology that worked backwards from today’s organisms to…

A small blue marble…

See how small that world looks? It’s a tiny pebble, a bit of rock and water covered by an infinitesimally thin layer of air. How amazing is it to look at our Earth like this? Invisible from this perspective, is a rapidly growing infection of organisms spreading like a cancer over the face of this globe. That’s us. Humans.

And like every other living thing on the spinning blue marble of our planet, we humans are infected by a plethora of parasites and pathogens, including the most numerous biological entity on the planet, viruses. But. …

1. A family of naturalists

While Gregor Johann Mendel’s family was stuck in feudal serfdom and mud-groveling poverty, Charles Robert Darwin was born into a family that enjoyed generations of wealth and class privileges.

Charles’s father, Robert Darwin, was a physician and investor who married into one of the wealthiest families in the area. Robert’s wife Susannah was the daughter of Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the Wedgwood and Sons pottery company — famous for Wedgwood china and Staffordshire pottery, and still operating today (though now owned by other companies).

Darwin’s paternal grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, was a physician like his son Robert, and his father Robert…

The Humble Home for Wayward Words…

These are the latest stories that y’all have submitted and I am honored to host on WotWU.

Please check the main WotWU page since I may have inadvertantly missed some amazing writers and their works. If I’ve left you out, give me a shout and I’ll rectify my error (and I apologize in advance).

Since last week’s update, we have published work by the following:

Cooking at Home:

Grilled Corn and Bell Pepper SaladGrilled Corn and Bell Pepper Salad is a perfect summertime side dish for any meal. Charred sweet, crisp corn, grilled bell peppers, and…

Italian Sprinkle CookiesItalian Sprinkle…

The monastery as a center of science

In the mid-1850s in a small town called Brno, then part of the Austrian Empire, an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel was quietly tending peas in the garden of the St. Thomas Monastery.

A few years earlier Mendel had completed his studies at the University of Vienna in mathematics and physics under Christian Doppler (who discovered the Doppler effect which we use today to measure the speed of cars and galaxies), and botany under Franz Unger (who hypothesized that some unknown components within plant cells determined their heredity, and proposed a theory of evolution prior to Darwin’s publication of On…

New experiments show spiders can discriminate in ways previously shown only by vertebrates like mammals…

We know from many experiments that animals, including humans, can detect and recognize other animals from a minimal amount of information. Less than a dozen moving dots on a black screen is enough information! You can see for yourself that a few moving dots are enough for us to know that their motion represents a person, for example. We often fail to recognize a still-image of the same dots, but easily recognize the person from the moving dots. Check out these videos:

Even children…