A coming out story about disability — I came out as autistic in 2021 — in October, right around my birthday. But though my first article on “Coming Out Autistic” (in Scientific American.) explained the process I’d gone through to acknowledge my autism, I did not really live my autism publicly until 2022. In other words, though…

Mystery instructions, disappearing SD cards, and hidden elevators make my job feel like espionage — I posted this story for the first time right after it happened. I wanted to bring it up again, partly because it’s a comedy of errors… partly because I have an update. The book I was researching is complete, and the object of my desire, so hard won? Well. …

If you looked carefully at the night sky, and you did so every night for a year, you would notice something unusual. — In the small hours of morning, when sleep has fled and the strange noises of night crowd young imaginations, numbers can be magical. I do not mean math proper, not yet; I mean the solidity and reality of counting. We counted sheep, we counted our toes and small fingers, our…

How the Victorian War on Women led to London’s First Serial Killer — “To please a man I did wrong first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hands on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored. In the hospital it is a man again who makes prayer and reads the Bible for us. We are had…

Part two of Chasing Eve — have we really cloned a human? Photo by Isaac Quesada on Unsplash Part 2. [read part 1] The first announcement of human cloning preceded both Zavos and Boisselier by one year. “They were such tiny dots” wrote Jose Cibelli, Robert Lanza, and Michael West (vice president of research, vice…

Is Cloning the Future? — To clone or not to clone *isn’t* the question — it’s whether or not we’ve already done it. Summer Sheep: Photo by Jørgen Håland on Unsplash Part 1. [Read Part 2] They called her Eve. Born on December 26th, 2002, she would immediately become the center of controversy — and of an ugly custody battle…

The Human-Machine Interface and the Race to Turn Thought into Motion — The griddle overheats, and a skittering of hot oil pops from pan to skin. The combined sensation of heat and pain trigger a natural reaction; I jerk my hand away, and instinctively put the offended knuckle in my mouth. Two and half seconds, maybe less, but thousands of firing neurons…

The strange science of life, death, and consciousness The paper appeared in Nature, and the scientists were careful to say that only bits of the brains had come back online, not enough to equal consciousness. All the same, the findings were paradigm-shattering. It means, for one thing, we don’t die…

What is happening and what can be done. A conversation between Brandy Schillace and Eric Garcia — Introduction: Red states have been limiting transgender care through unfair legislation, seeking to limit or eliminate affirming outlets for trans youth. That’s bad enough. But recently, states like Alabama and Georgia have added additional language that targets those with disabilities, too. Gabriel Arkles writes that “ableist justifications for anti-trans legislation…