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Fire and Cooking: The First Energy Revolution Around two million years ago, our ancestors did something no other species had done: they harnessed fire. This wasn't just a convenience. It wasn't just warmth and protection from predators. Fire was humanity's first energy technology, and

Why Eating Less Extends Life: The Science of Caloric Restriction Series: Longevity Science | Part: 5 of 7 Primary Tag: FRONTIER SCIENCE Keywords: caloric restriction, intermittent fasting, mTOR, AMPK, sirtuins, longevity, metabolism In 1935, a nutritionist at Cornell named Clive McCay reported something remarkable. Rats fed a diet with 30-40%

The Energy of Civilization Every leap in human capacity has been an energy leap. Fire. Agriculture. Coal. Oil. Electricity. Nuclear. Each transition expanded what humanity could do—not through cleverness alone, but through access to more power. The story of civilization is, in large part, the story of energy. This

The New Neuroscience The brain is the most complex object in the known universe. 86 billion neurons, each connected to thousands of others, running on 20 watts of power, generating consciousness, memory, emotion, language, and everything you call "you." And for most of history, we couldn't

Glial Cells: The Other Half of Your Brain For most of the history of neuroscience, glial cells were the forgotten majority. Your brain contains roughly 86 billion neurons. It also contains roughly the same number of glial cells—maybe more. That's half your brain, by cell count, that

Optogenetics: Controlling Neurons with Light In 2005, Karl Deisseroth's lab at Stanford did something that sounded impossible. They took a gene from algae—a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein—and inserted it into mammalian neurons. When they shone blue light on those neurons, they fired.