A preternaturally talented, precocious child, barely out of toddlerhood, in powdered wig and knee-breeches, capering around the great houses of 18th century Europe between virtuoso performances on the harpsichord. A young boy who can play any piece anyone puts in front of him, and compose symphonies extemporaneously with ease…. Few scenes better capture the mythos […]

The Reagan presidency was probably the golden age of anti-drug messaging. America’s school kids were told that a brain was like an egg and drugs were like a frying pan. The First Lady told America’s school kids simply to “Just Say No.” The message was stupefyingly simple. Drugs, like Communism and taxes, are bad. During […]

In 1926, Fritz Kahn, a German gynecologist and anatomy textbook author, produced a lithograph called Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace) that depicted the human body as a factory, a chemical plant of sorts. Kahn’s body came complete with mechanical lungs, a rock-sorting stomach, gears for a throat, and a switchboard for a brain, and it […]

Image by Rochester Institute of Technology, via Wikimedia Commons When New York City hosted The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asimov, the prolific sci-fi author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, took the opportunity to wonder what the world would look like 50 years hence — assuming the world survived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writing […]