online archive

The body, aging, biotechnology and more

From Daedalus, a special issue on the Body in Mind, including Antonio Damasio and Hanna Damasio (USC): Minding the body; Gerald Edelman (SRI): The embodiment of mind; Arne Öhman (Karolinska): Making sense of emotion: evolution, reason & the brain; Carol Gilligan (NYU): When the mind leaves the body... and returns; William Connolly (JHU): Experience & experiment; Jacques d'Amboise on the mind in dance; Roy Dolan (Wellcome): The body in the brain; and Jerry Fodor (Rutgers): How the mind works: what we still don't know. A review of I Am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter.

From Daedalus, a special issue on Aging, including Chris Wilson (IIASA): The century ahead; Henry Aaron (Brookings): Longer life spans: boon or burden?; Sarah Harper (Oxford): Mature societies: planning for our future selves; Paul Baltes (Virginia): Facing our limits: human dignity in the very old; Linda Partridge (UCL): Of worms, mice & men: altering rates of aging; Hillard Kaplan (New Mexico): The life course of a skill-intensive foraging species; Dennis Selkoe (Harvard): The aging mind: deciphering Alzheimer's disease & its antecedents; Caleb Finch (USC): Aging, inflammation & the body electric; an essay by Kenneth Clark on The artist grows old; Jagadeesh Gokhale (Cato) and Kent Smetters (Penn): Measuring Social Security's financial outlook within an aging society; and Lisa Berkman and M. Maria Glymour (Harvard): How society shapes aging: the centrality of variability.

A review of The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century, by Nikolas Rose. According to transhumanist Michael Anissimov, there’s an even chance that we’re looking at immortality or existential destruction in the next 20-40 years. A review of The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age of Genetic Engineering by Michael J. Sandel. The extra embryos: Be fruitful and multiply, even in the lab. A review of The Medicalization of Society: On the Transformation of Human Conditions into Treatable Disorders by Peter Conrad. A review of Vaccine: The Controversial Story of Medicine's Greatest Lifesaver by Arthur Allen. A review of The Lonely Patient: How We Experience Illness by Michael Stein.

The Royal Society of Chemistry presents a visually striking online periodic table of the elements. A lithium imbalance: The universe's chemistry looks wonky. That may change the laws of physics. The Universe, expanding beyond all understanding: Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe. A review of Traveling at the Speed of Thought: Einstein and the Quest for Gravitational Waves, by Daniel Kennefick. An interview with Donal O'Shea, author of The Poincaré Conjecture: In Search of the Shape of the Universe (and a review).