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 “Complexity that works is built up out of modules that work perfectly, layered one over the other.”      - Kevin Kelly Living creatures are almost incomprehensibly complex. Take the human body, which is made up of trillions of cells creating...

One of the classic images of pediatric medicine in the United States is the image of a physician giving a vaccination shot. Like many other classic images of twentieth-century life in the US, this one is unsurprisingly immortalized in a Norman Rockwell painting....

For thousands of years, humans have struggled against infectious diseases transmitted by mosquitos. Records describing the symptoms of malaria can be traced back to 2700 B.C. in China. Other mosquito-borne diseases, such as yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile virus...

Last week, the New York Times reported that two-thirds of the world is facing severe water shortages at least once a year. A large chunk of the affected population is in India and China, but areas of the United States like Texas, Florida, and California are included...

Artificial cooling is not a particularly new technology. The practice of using ice-storehouses and iceboxes to preserve food dates back to the early 19th century. Harvesting ice in areas like New England for shipment to places like the American south and the Caribbean...

In 1908, looking to test Mendel’s theories on heredity, Thomas Hunt Morgan began studying Drosophila melanogaster (also known as the fruit fly or vinegar fly) in his “Fly Room” at Columbia University. Dr. Morgan and his students studied flies, looking for mutations,...