Mindframe

You may not know the name of Hungarian journalist László József Bíró, but if you’ve ever written a shopping list or jotted down a quick note, you probably owe him. Frustrated by the constant smearing of his fountain pen, Bíró noticed one day that newspaper ink dried considerably faster than his writing ink. Had Bíró found a solution to his handwriting woes? Well, no. Poured into a 30’s era fountain pen, newspaper ink was too thick and sticky to work on a standard nib. After some tinkering, he hit upon the idea of a ball and socket approach, and with some ink-brewing help from his chemist brother György, the world had its first ballpoint pen. The new design soon found some success, beloved by World War II British Royal Airforce pilots because it didn’t leak at high altitudes.  After the war ended, a number of companies duked it out for the rights to produce their own ballpoint creations. Who ultimately came out on top? A Frenchman, Marcel Bich,  and the company ...

Western medicine prides itself on the ability to diagnose and treat a variety of maladies that a very short time ago were considered fatal. Part and parcel of the extension of treatments is the idea of specialization. We’ve become accustomed to specialty medicine. It seems to make sense: someone gaining expertise and mastery over one specific body part, the sum of those parts equaling your aunt Betty. But what if the template for modern medicine, this very concept of the human body, was fundamentally flawed? What if your body is not a tally of parts but one giant complex system with many subsystems operating in tandem? Perhaps you can see where this is going. Scientists are beginning to discover that the body is governed by not just the brain in our heads, but multiple auxiliary sub-brains, located in other organs, connected by neurons, and all carefully timed to operate with each other. The analogy might be a symphony, where musicians must listen to each other to blend into...

Ants are amazing. They can carry 50 times their body weight. Their total biomass worldwide equals the total biomass of humans. Fungus ants started farming 50 million years before agriculture was even a glint in early human eyes. When it comes to teamwork, humans can't compare. There may be no "I" in team, but there are plenty of ants. Collectively, a colony of ants is capable of a variety of sophisticated actions—building intricate nests ( out of their own bodies if they're army ants ), fighting wars with other colonies, raising livestock , and yes, even raiding that picnic basket. All this despite the long-established fact that ants are just not that smart. It's not unusual to see two ants struggling to carry a crumb in opposite directions. Although the number varies from species to species, the average ant has something like 250,000 neurons. To be fair, that's more than double the neurons of a lobster (100,000), but even a humble cockroach puts it to ...

Hershey, Pennsylvania may be proud of their namesake, but they have nothing on the ancient Aztecs. It’s speculated that chocolate, derived from the cacao bean (pronounced “ca-COW”) had its coming out party some 3100 years ago as an Aztec religious tradition. What you may not know is that some believe the drinking chocolate of the Aztecs began as a beer recipe gone horribly wrong. It seems the Aztecs liked their beer, and enjoyed dabbling in home brewing. One can only imagine their surprise, taking that first sip of what they thought would be a rich dark stout, only to discover they’d concocted something closer to an unsweetened hot cocoa. Intentional or not, a cavalcade of recent medical evidence suggests the Aztecs were onto something. Dark chocolate, defined as 70% or higher in cacao, has some remarkable benefits. Milk chocolate, as in the standard Hershey bar, has much more sugar and much less cacao. But its less sweet counterpart boasts high levels of both flavonoids and...