I’m struck by how old some Nobel Prize winners are when they finally are honoured. In 2019, at the ripe age of 97, John Goodenough won a share of a Nobel for his

The process of choosing Nobel Prize-winning work and winners begins soon after the awards ceremony the previous year. Invitations are sent out for nominations to hundreds of experts around the world, including previous

The Nobel series, an annual November-December review of the year’s Nobel Prizes announced in October, has been a success for the Niagara-on-the-Lake Public Library since it began in 2017. Sometimes it’s possible to

Well before Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier received their richly deserved Nobel Prize in 2022 for pioneering work on gene editing, it was obvious the practice held great promise for hundreds of hereditary

One of the things I enjoy and admire about science is that nothing is for certain. Hypotheses we thought were true may turn out to be wrong, or at least in heavy need

Unfortunately, strokes remain common. The most common are ischemic in origin – the result of a block in an arterial branch, whether a local blood clot or an embolus that deprives the affected

The three most important evolutionary changes on the way to modern humans were bipedalism, repurposing the forelimbs and especially the hands for fashioning and using tools, and a brain capable of symbolic thinking,

The perfect marriage, in a technical sense, was the relationship between the computer and artificial intelligence (AI) which began in the 1940s and 1950s. Like the best human marriages, it got better and

Despite his age, 36-year-old Novak Djokovic has been at the top of men’s tennis for a decade with no clear end in sight. So far, he has surpassed his rivals of the last

The brain is incredibly complex – so complex that some scientists – including Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist Steven Weinberg, were prompted to wonder whether humans will ever fully grasp how this marvellous organ

When I worked at the New England Medical Center in the 1990s, I was part of a sports medicine clinic that served professional and college athletes, and dancers in the Boston Ballet. Far

Were any disease to be called cruel, Alzheimer’s disease would surely be near the top of the list. It wipes out a lifetime of memories, relationships with long-time partners and friends and toward

If you want to figure out how the brain works, there are several options. One classical method, which served clinical neurologists and neurosurgeons very well in the 19th and 20th centuries, was to

In the springtime of the initial four years we lived in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a female fox with a decided limp in her left leg took up residence in the culvert beneath our driveway. With

American President Joe Biden is now 80 years old, and in the next presidential election in November 2024, he will be nearly 82. Four years later, near the end of what could be

Ischemic strokes, those caused by an obstruction in a feeding artery, are more common than hemorrhagic strokes. Small ones, the result of obstructions in small arteries or arterioles, are common enough and most

Forgetting the names of people, where you placed the car keys and the occasional appointment are common much beyond the age of 80. We’re all guilty as charged and most of the time,

The story of the Big Bang we’re familiar with runs something like this: For reasons unknown, and as yet enigmatic, incredibly tiny, dense, quantal energy field inflated in a trillionth, of a trillionth,

Leftovers of last year’s weeds reminded me how much work it takes to control them. So also it is with our minds – too many weedy distractions threaten to distract us, whether emails,

In the late 1940s and early ’50s, where I grew up, baseball was our favourite game, not so much at school but in makeup games on diamonds in nearby Gibbons Park or a

On a recent Sunday following the 8:30 a.m. service at St. Mark’s, I visited my wife Jan at Pleasant Manor Radiant Care in Virgil. After the usual COVID test, I passed Jan’s room