“Your mouth microbiome might be threatening your hearing!” “What?” — Despite what you may have seen in childhood cartoons, your head is not hollow. We cannot shine a flashlight into one ear and out the other — and no matter how hard you take a drag on a cigarette, you won’t get smoke wafting out through your ears. But there…

Three predictions for how the giant will address worker turnover, when there’s no one left to hire — Amazon, the giant corporation that handles everything from online physical item sales to ebooks to streaming video to providing the backbone of the internet through AWS, is killing it. Their stock has significantly outperformed the S&P500 over the last five years. They’ve opened new distribution centers across the United States…

The healthy, doctor-advised move may be to give babies a taste of their own medicine, the little shits — Babies are well known for being great at three things: crying, pooping, and turning their parents’ lives upside down. But while babies are totally fine to cause lots of stress to their parents, they don’t happen to be great at handling stress, themselves. …

and you can buy another nearly-gone species in the pet store — When we talk about extinct species, we usually consider creatures that vanished from the Earth millions of years ago. Dinosaurs, giant sloths, maybe wooly mammoths. What about a more recent species that went extinct? Most people could probably come up with the dodo, or perhaps the Australian dingo. In a…

On PhDs, pretentiousness vs. feminism, and what we have to “prove” — Almost immediately after I rang the bell and turned in my final dissertation, I rushed to update my title. I’m a PhD holder! That means that I’m no longer boring old Mr. Sam Westreich; I’m the new, exciting, Dr. Sam Westreich! …or am I just Sam Westreich, PhD? Or is…

Cure-all for many conditions, or totally bunk? The answer depends on how it’s used. — Every time I turn around, there’s a new “natural superfood” that has supposedly existed for hundreds of years, but is only now being recognized as an amazing cure-all for every disease that ever afflicts the human body. Aren’t we going to run out of new “ancient superfoods” to e̶x̶p̶l̶o̶i̶t̶ promote? …

And can buying your produce from the right location help overcome these deficiencies? — When we think about healthy, nutritious food, we usually turn to fruits and vegetables. Bright colors, leafy greens, natural food that came right out of the earth and was placed on a plate with minimal processing. But appearances can be deceiving, as anyone who has mixed up a shishito and…

Legally, at least. It sounds insane — but it offers protection to endangered bumble bees. — Four different species of bumble bees are now, in California, considered to be fish in the eyes of the law. Don’t worry, it’s not “liberal insanity.” Rather, it’s what happens when biology butts up against legal limits, and how sometimes a nonsensical compromise ends up being the faster, and thus…

Can I convince you to taste one? What if I explain the science of their surprising taste? — Here’s a little story from my teenage years about how I ate some ants: during the summers when school was off, I attended an outdoors camp in northwoods Minnesota. I went first as a camper, then as a counselor, and finally as the director of the nature program. We covered…