Download 435 High Resolution Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of America

in Art, Biology, Nature | January 15th, 2026

In our expe­ri­ence, bird lovers fall into two gen­er­al cat­e­gories:

Keen­ly obser­vant cat­a­loguers like John James Audubon …

And those of us who can­not resist assign­ing anthro­po­mor­phic per­son­al­i­ties and behav­iors to the 435 stars of Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca, a stun­ning col­lec­tion of prints from life-size water­col­ors he pro­duced between 1827 and 1838.

Our sus­pi­cions have lit­tle to do with biol­o­gy, but rather, a cer­tain zesti­ness of expres­sion, an overem­phat­ic beak, a droll gleam in the eye.

The Audubon Society’s new­ly redesigned web­site abounds with trea­sure for those in either camp:

Free high res down­loads of all 435 plates.

Mp3s of each specimen’s call.

And vin­tage com­men­tary that effec­tive­ly splits the dif­fer­ence between sci­ence and the unin­ten­tion­al­ly humor­ous locu­tions of anoth­er age.

Take for instance, the Bur­row­ing Owl, as described by self-taught nat­u­ral­ist Thomas Say (1787–1834):

It is delight­ful, dur­ing fine weath­er, to see these live­ly lit­tle crea­tures sport­ing about the entrance of their bur­rows, which are always kept in the neat­est repair, and are often inhab­it­ed by sev­er­al indi­vid­u­als. When alarmed, they imme­di­ate­ly take refuge in their sub­ter­ranean cham­bers; or, if the dread­ed dan­ger be not imme­di­ate­ly impend­ing, they stand near the brink of the entrance, brave­ly bark­ing and flour­ish­ing their tails, or else sit erect to recon­noitre the move­ments of the ene­my.

The notes of ornithol­o­gist John Kirk Townsend (1809 – 1851) sug­gest that not every­one was as tak­en with the species as Say (who was, in all fair­ness, the father of Amer­i­can ento­mol­o­gy):

Noth­ing can be more unpleas­ant than the bag­ging of this species, on account of the fleas with which their plumage swarms, and which in all prob­a­bil­i­ty have been left in the bur­row by the Bad­ger or Mar­mot, at the time it was aban­doned by these ani­mals. I know of no oth­er bird infest­ed by that kind of ver­min. 

The Com­mon Gallinule, above, sug­gests that there’s often more to these birds than meets the eye. His some­what sheep­ish look­ing coun­te­nance belies the red hot love life Audubon recounts:

… the man­i­fes­ta­tions of their ama­to­ry propen­si­ty were quite remark­able. The male birds court­ed the females, both on the land and on the water; they fre­quent­ly spread out their tail like a fan, and moved round each oth­er, emit­ting a mur­mur­ing sound for some sec­onds. The female would after­wards walk to the water’s edge, stand in the water up to her breast, and receive the caress­es of the male, who imme­di­ate­ly after would strut on the water before her, jerk­ing with rapid­i­ty his spread tail for awhile, after which they would both resume their ordi­nary occu­pa­tions.

Being that we are firm­ly plant­ed in the sec­ond type of bird lover’s camp, this ornitho­log­i­cal cor­nu­copia main­ly serves to whet our appetite for more Falseknees, self-described bird nerd Joshua Barkman’s beau­ti­ful­ly ren­dered web­com­ic.

Yes, Audubon’s Indi­go Bird, aka Petit Pape­bleu, “an active and live­ly lit­tle fel­low” who “pos­sess­es much ele­gance in his shape, and also a cer­tain degree of firm­ness in his make” was sep­a­rat­ed by a cen­tu­ry or so from “Mood Indi­go”—we pre­sume that’s the tune stuck in Barkman’s bird’s head—but he does look rather pre­oc­cu­pied, no?

Pos­si­bly just think­ing of meal­worms…

Explore Audubon’s Birds of Amer­i­ca by chrono­log­i­cal or alpha­bet­i­cal order, or by state, and down­load them all for free here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

A Lav­ish­ly Illus­trat­ed Cat­a­log of All Hum­ming­bird Species Known in the 19th Cen­tu­ry Gets Restored & Put Online

What Kind of Bird Is That?: A Free App From Cor­nell Will Give You the Answer

Explore an Inter­ac­tive Ver­sion of The Wall of Birds, a 2,500 Square-Foot Mur­al That Doc­u­ments the Evo­lu­tion of Birds Over 375 Mil­lion Years

The Bird Library: A Library Built Espe­cial­ly for Our Fine Feath­ered Friends

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and the­ater mak­er in NYC.

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Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vigorous” and “Alert”

in Biology, Life, Science | January 13th, 2026

One poten­tial draw­back of genius, it seems, is rest­less­ness, a mind per­pet­u­al­ly on the move. Of course, this is what makes many cel­e­brat­ed thinkers and artists so pro­duc­tive. That and the extra hours some gain by sac­ri­fic­ing sleep. Voltaire report­ed­ly drank up to 50 cups of cof­fee a day, and seems to have suf­fered no par­tic­u­lar­ly ill effects. Balzac did the same, and died at 51. The caf­feine may have had some­thing to do with it. Both Socrates and Samuel John­son believed that sleep is wast­ed time, and “so for years has thought grey-haired Richard Buck­min­ster Fuller,” wrote Time mag­a­zine in 1943, “futu­rif­ic inven­tor of the Dymax­ion house, the Dymax­ion car and the Dymax­ion globe.”

Engi­neer and vision­ary Fuller intend­ed his “Dymax­ion” brand to rev­o­lu­tion­ize every aspect of human life, or—in the now-slight­ly-dat­ed par­lance of our obses­sion with all things hacking—he engi­neered a series of rad­i­cal “life­hacks.” Giv­en his views on sleep, that seem­ing­ly essen­tial activ­i­ty also received a Dymax­ion upgrade, the trade­marked name com­bin­ing “dynam­ic,” “max­i­mum,” and “ten­sion.” “Two hours of sleep a day,” Fuller announced, “is plen­ty.” Did he con­sult with spe­cial­ists? Med­ical doc­tors? Biol­o­gists? Noth­ing as dull as that. He did what many a mad sci­en­tist does in the movies. (In the search, as Vin­cent Price says at the end of The Fly, “for the truth.”) He cooked up a the­o­ry, and test­ed it on him­self.

“Fuller,” Time report­ed, “rea­soned that man has a pri­ma­ry store of ener­gy, quick­ly replen­ished, and a sec­ondary reserve (sec­ond wind) that takes longer to restore.” He hypoth­e­sized that we would need less sleep if we stopped to take a nap at “the first sign of fatigue.” Fuller trained him­self to do just that, for­go­ing the typ­i­cal eight hours, more or less, most of us get per night. He found—as have many artists and researchers over the years—that “after a half-hour nap he was com­plete­ly refreshed.” Naps every six hours allowed him to shrink his total sleep per 24-hour peri­od to two hours. Did he, like the 50s mad sci­en­tist, become a trag­ic vic­tim of his own exper­i­ment?

No dan­ger of merg­ing him with a fly or turn­ing him invis­i­ble. The exper­i­men­t’s fail­ure may have meant a day in bed catch­ing up on lost sleep. Instead, Fuller kept it up for two full years, 1932 and 1933, and report­ed feel­ing in “the most vig­or­ous and alert con­di­tion that I have ever enjoyed.” He might have slept two hours a day in 30 minute incre­ments indef­i­nite­ly, Time sug­gests, but found that his “busi­ness asso­ciates… insist­ed on sleep­ing like oth­er men,” and wouldn’t adapt to his eccen­tric sched­ule, though some not for lack of try­ing. In his book Buck­y­Works J. Bald­win claims, “I can per­son­al­ly attest that many of his younger col­leagues and stu­dents could not keep up with him. He nev­er seemed to tire.”

A research orga­ni­za­tion looked into the sleep sys­tem and “not­ed that not every­one was able to train them­selves to sleep on com­mand.” The point may seem obvi­ous to the sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple who suf­fer from insom­nia. “Bucky dis­con­cert­ed observers,” Bald­win writes, “by going to sleep in thir­ty sec­onds, as if he had thrown an Off switch in his head. It hap­pened so quick­ly that it looked like he had had a seizure.” Buck­min­ster Fuller was undoubt­ed­ly an unusu­al human, but human all the same. Time report­ed that “most sleep inves­ti­ga­tors agree that the first hours of sleep are the sound­est.” A Col­gate Uni­ver­si­ty researcher at the time dis­cov­ered that “peo­ple awak­ened after four hours’ sleep were just as alert, well-coor­di­nat­ed phys­i­cal­ly and resis­tant to fatigue” as those who slept the full eight.

Sleep research since the for­ties has made a num­ber of oth­er find­ings about vari­able sleep sched­ules among humans, study­ing shift work­ers’ sleep and the so-called “bipha­sic” pat­tern com­mon in cul­tures with very late bed­times and sies­tas in the mid­dle of the day. The suc­cess of this sleep rhythm “con­tra­dicts the nor­mal idea of a monopha­sic sleep­ing sched­ule,” writes Evan Mur­ray at MIT’s Cul­ture Shock, “in which all our time asleep is lumped into one block.” Bipha­sic sleep results in six or sev­en hours of sleep rather than the sev­en to nine of monopha­sic sleep­ers. Polypha­sic sleep­ing, how­ev­er, the kind pio­neered by Fuller, seems to gen­uine­ly result in even less need­ed sleep for many. It’s an idea that’s only become wide­spread “with­in rough­ly the last decade,” Mur­ray not­ed in 2009. He points to the redis­cov­ery, with­out any clear indebt­ed­ness, of Fuller’s Dymax­ion sys­tem by col­lege stu­dent Maria Staver, who named her method “Uber­man,” in hon­or of Niet­zsche, and spread its pop­u­lar­i­ty through a blog and a book.

Mur­ray also reports on anoth­er blog­ger, Steve Pavli­na, who con­duct­ed the exper­i­ment on him­self and found that “over a peri­od of 5 1/2 months, he was suc­cess­ful in adapt­ing com­plete­ly,” reap­ing the ben­e­fits of increased pro­duc­tiv­i­ty. But like Fuller, Pavli­na gave it up, not for “health rea­sons,” but because, he wrote, “the rest of the world is monopha­sic” or close to it. Our long block of sleep appar­ent­ly con­tains a good deal of “wast­ed tran­si­tion time” before we arrive at the nec­es­sary REM state. Polypha­sic sleep trains our brains to get to REM more quick­ly and effi­cient­ly. For this rea­son, writes Mur­ray, “I believe it can work for every­one.” Per­haps it can, pro­vid­ed they are will­ing to bear the social cost of being out of sync with the rest of the world. But peo­ple like­ly to prac­tice Dymax­ion Sleep for sev­er­al months or years prob­a­bly already are.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pow­er of Pow­er Naps: Sal­vador Dali Teach­es You How Micro-Naps Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

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How Many Humans Have Ever Lived, and How Many Are Alive Right Now?

in Biology, History | December 16th, 2025

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How many peo­ple have ever walked the earth? Good ques­tion, even if you’ve nev­er quite pon­dered it before. Accord­ing to the Pop­u­la­tion Ref­er­ence Bureau, a non-prof­it research orga­ni­za­tion, if you trav­el back to 8000 B.C.E., the world pop­u­la­tion stood at about 5 mil­lion. By 1 C.E., the num­ber climbs to 300 mil­lion, before grad­u­al­ly increas­ing to 500 mil­lion in 1650. Once we get beyond the plagues of the medieval peri­od, our pop­u­la­tion explodes, reach­ing the 1 bil­lion mark in 1800 and then 8 bil­lion in 2022. Tak­en togeth­er, an esti­mat­ed 117 bil­lion peo­ple have col­lec­tive­ly lived on our plan­et, and, of that total num­ber, 7% are alive right now. A strik­ing fig­ure. Using sim­i­lar data, video jour­nal­ist Cleo Abram visu­al­izes the his­tor­i­cal trend in a short, suc­cinct video above.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Cre­ates an Ani­mat­ed Visu­al­iza­tion of Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth from 1000 B.C.E. to 1965

200,000 Years of Stag­ger­ing Human Pop­u­la­tion Growth Shown in an Ani­mat­ed Map

Crowd­ed House: How the World’s Pop­u­la­tion Grew to 7 Bil­lion Peo­ple

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Ernst Haeckel’s Sublime Drawings of Flora & Fauna: The Beautiful Scientific Drawings That Influenced Europe’s Art Nouveau Movement (1889)

in Art, Biology, Science | September 24th, 2025

If you fol­low the ongo­ing beef many pop­u­lar sci­en­tists have with phi­los­o­phy, you’d be for­giv­en for think­ing the two dis­ci­plines have noth­ing to say to each oth­er. That’s a sad­ly false impres­sion, though they have become almost entire­ly sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion­al insti­tu­tions. But dur­ing the first, say, 200 years of mod­ern sci­ence, sci­en­tists were “nat­ur­al philosophers”—often as well versed in log­ic, meta­physics, or the­ol­o­gy as they were in math­e­mat­ics and tax­onomies. And most of them were artists too of one kind or anoth­er. Sci­en­tists had to learn to draw in order to illus­trate their find­ings before mass-pro­duced pho­tog­ra­phy and com­put­er imag­ing could do it for them. Many sci­en­tists have been fine artists indeed, rival­ing the greats, and they’ve made very fine musi­cians as well.

And then there’s Ernst Hein­rich Haeck­el, a Ger­man biol­o­gist and nat­u­ral­ist, philoso­pher and physi­cian, and pro­po­nent of Dar­win­ism who described and named thou­sands of species, mapped them on a genealog­i­cal tree, and “coined sev­er­al sci­en­tif­ic terms com­mon­ly known today,” This is Colos­sal writes, “such as ecol­o­gy, phy­lum, and stem cell.” That’s an impres­sive resume, isn’t it? Oh, and check out his art—his bril­liant­ly col­ored, ele­gant­ly ren­dered, high­ly styl­ized depic­tions of “far flung flo­ra and fau­na,” of microbes and nat­ur­al pat­terns, in designs that inspired the Art Nou­veau move­ment. “Each organ­ism Haeck­el drew has an almost abstract form,” notes Kather­ine Schwab at Fast Co. Design, “as if it’s a whim­si­cal fan­ta­sy he dreamed up rather than a real crea­ture he exam­ined under a micro­scope. His draw­ings of sponges reveal their intense­ly geo­met­ric structure—they look archi­tec­tur­al, like feats of engi­neer­ing.”

Haeck­el pub­lished 100 fab­u­lous prints begin­ning in 1889 in a series of ten books called Kun­st­for­men der Natur (“Art Forms in Nature”), col­lect­ed in two vol­umes in 1904. The aston­ish­ing work was “not just a book of illus­tra­tions but also the sum­ma­tion of his view of the world,” one which embraced the new sci­ence of Dar­win­ian evo­lu­tion whole­heart­ed­ly, writes schol­ar Olaf Brei­d­bach in his 2006 Visions of Nature.

Haeckel’s method was a holis­tic one, in which art, sci­ence, and phi­los­o­phy were com­ple­men­tary approach­es to the same sub­ject. He “sought to secure the atten­tion of those with an inter­est in the beau­ties of nature,” writes pro­fes­sor of zool­o­gy Rain­er Will­mann in a book from Taschen called The Art and Sci­ence of Ernst Haeck­el­, “and to empha­size, through this rare instance of the inter­play of sci­ence and aes­thet­ics, the prox­im­i­ty of these two realms.”

The gor­geous Taschen book includes 450 of Haeckel’s draw­ings, water­col­ors, and sketch­es, spread across 704 pages, and it’s expen­sive. But you can see all 100 of Haeckel’s orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished prints in zoomable high-res­o­lu­tion scans here. Or pur­chase a one-vol­ume reprint of the orig­i­nal Art Forms in Nature, with its 100 glo­ri­ous prints, through this Dover pub­li­ca­tion, which describes Haeckel’s art as “hav­ing caused the accep­tance of Dar­win­ism in Europe…. Today, although no one is great­ly inter­est­ed in Haeck­el the biol­o­gist-philoso­pher, his work is increas­ing­ly prized for some­thing he him­self would prob­a­bly have con­sid­ered sec­ondary.” It’s a shame his sci­en­tif­ic lega­cy lies neglect­ed, if that’s so, but it sure­ly lives on through his art, which may be just as need­ed now to illus­trate the won­ders of evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy and the nat­ur­al world as it was in Haeckel’s time.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Down­load 435 High Res­o­lu­tion Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca

Explore a New Archive of 2,200 His­tor­i­cal Wildlife Illus­tra­tions (1916–1965): Cour­tesy of The Wildlife Con­ser­va­tion Soci­ety

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Cats in Japan­ese Wood­block Prints: How Japan’s Favorite Ani­mals Came to Star in Its Pop­u­lar Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Explore the Fascinating Map of Fungi: An Introduction to the Vast Mushroom Kingdom

in Biology, Maps | September 22nd, 2025

Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured Domain of Sci­ence’s elab­o­rate info­graph­ic maps of such vast fields of intel­lec­tu­al endeav­or as math­e­mat­ics, physics, com­put­er sci­ence, quan­tum physics, quan­tum com­put­ing, chem­istry, biol­o­gy, and med­i­cine. Over time, the series’ cre­ator Dominic Wal­li­man has branched out, as it were, even to king­doms of the nat­ur­al world, like plants. With Plan­tae down, which of the oth­er five has he tak­en on next? That ques­tion is answered in the video above, which intro­duces Domain of Sci­ence’s new Fas­ci­nat­ing Map of Fun­gi.

Yes, this big map depicts the realm of the hum­ble mush­room, which “shares the for­est with the plants and the ani­mals, but it’s not a plant, and it’s not an ani­mal.” And the mush­room itself, like we’re used to see­ing sprout­ing beneath our feet, is only a small part of the organ­ism: the rest “lives hid­den, out of sight, below ground. Beneath every mush­room is a fun­gal net­work of hair-like strands called the myceli­um,” which begins as a spore.

The huge­ly diverse “fruit­ing bod­ies” that they push out of the sur­face have only one job: “to dis­perse the spores and grow the next gen­er­a­tion.” But only ten per­cent of fun­gi species actu­al­ly do this; the rest don’t pro­duce any­thing we would rec­og­nize as mush­rooms at all.

About 150,000 species of fun­gi have been dis­cov­ered so far. Though inan­i­mate, they man­age to do quite a lot, such as sup­ply­ing nutri­ents to plants (or killing them), gen­er­at­ing chem­i­cals that have proven extreme­ly use­ful (or at least con­scious­ness-expand­ing) to humans, hijack­ing the ner­vous sys­tems of arthro­pods, and even sur­viv­ing in out­er space. And of course, “because of their abil­i­ty to con­cen­trate nutri­ents from with­in the soil, fun­gi are an excel­lent source of food for us and many oth­er ani­mals.” Mycol­o­gists esti­mate that there remain at least two or three mil­lion more species “out there in nature wait­ing to be dis­cov­ered.” At least a few of them, one hopes, will turn out to be tasty.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Stun­ning, Hand-Illus­trat­ed Book of Mush­rooms Drawn by an Over­looked 19th Cen­tu­ry Female Sci­en­tist

The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Atlas of Mush­rooms: Edi­ble, Sus­pect and Poi­so­nous (1827)

The Mush­room Col­or Atlas: An Inter­ac­tive Web Site Lets You Explore the Incred­i­ble Spec­trum of Col­ors Cre­at­ed from Fun­gi

Death-Cap Mush­rooms are Ter­ri­fy­ing and Unstop­pable: A Wild Ani­ma­tion

Björk Takes You on a Jour­ney into the Vast King­dom of Mush­rooms with the New Doc­u­men­tary Fun­gi: Web of Life

How Mush­room Time-Laps­es Are Filmed: A Glimpse Into the Pio­neer­ing Time-Lapse Cin­e­matog­ra­phy Behind the Net­flix Doc­u­men­tary Fan­tas­tic Fun­gi

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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Behold an Anatomically Correct Replica of the Human Brain, Knitted by a Psychiatrist

in Art, Biology, Creativity | September 4th, 2025

Our brains dic­tate our every move.

They’re the ones who spur us to study hard, so we can make some­thing of our­selves, in order to bet­ter our com­mu­ni­ties.

They name our babies, choose our clothes, decide what we’re hun­gry for.

They make and break laws, orga­nize protests, frit­ter away hours on social media, and give us the green light to binge watch a bunch of dumb shows when we could be read­ing War and Peace.

They also plant the seeds for Fitz­car­ral­do-like cre­ative endeav­ors that take over our lives and gen­er­ate lit­tle to no income.

We may describe such endeav­ors as a labor of love, into which we’ve poured our entire heart and soul, but think for a sec­ond.

Who’s real­ly respon­si­ble here?

The heart, that mus­cu­lar fist-sized Valen­tine, con­tent to just pump-pump-pump its way through life, lub-dub, lub-dub, from cra­dle to grave?

Or the brain, a crafty Iago of an organ, pos­ses­sor of bil­lions of neu­rons, com­plex, con­tra­dic­to­ry, a mys­tery we’re far from unrav­el­ing?

Psy­chi­a­trist Dr. Karen Nor­berg’s brain has steered her to study such heavy duty sub­jects as the day­care effect, the rise in youth sui­cide, and the risk of pre­scrib­ing selec­tive sero­tonin reup­take inhibitors as a treat­ment for depres­sion.

On a lighter note, it also told her to devote nine months to knit­ting an anatom­i­cal­ly cor­rect repli­ca of the human brain.

(Twelve, if you count three months of research before cast­ing on.)

How did her brain con­vince her to embark on this mad­cap assign­ment?

Easy. It arranged for her to be in the mid­dle of a more pro­sa­ic knit­ting project, then goosed her into notic­ing how the ruf­fles of that project resem­bled the wrin­kles of the cere­bral cor­tex.

Coin­ci­dence?

Not like­ly. Espe­cial­ly when one of the cere­bral cor­tex’s most impor­tant duties is deci­sion mak­ing.

As she explained in an inter­view with The Tele­graph, brain devel­op­ment is not unlike the growth of a knit­ted piece:

You can see very nat­u­ral­ly how the ‘rip­pling’ effect of the cere­bral cor­tex emerges from prop­er­ties that prob­a­bly have to do with nerve cell growth. In the case of knit­ting, the effect is cre­at­ed by increas­ing the num­ber of stitch­es in each row.

Dr. Norberg—who, yes, has on occa­sion referred to her project as a labor of love—told Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can that such a mas­sive crafty under­tak­ing appealed to her sense of humor because “it seemed so ridicu­lous and would be an enor­mous­ly com­pli­cat­ed, absurd­ly ambi­tious thing to do.”

That’s the point at which many people’s brains would give them per­mis­sion to stop, but Dr. Nor­berg and her brain per­sist­ed, push­ing past the hypo­thet­i­cal, cre­at­ing col­or­ful indi­vid­ual struc­tures that were even­tu­al­ly sewn into two cud­dly hemi­spheres that can be joined with a zip­per.

(She also let slip that her brain—by which she means the knit­ted one, though the obser­va­tion cer­tain­ly holds true for the one in her head—is female, due to its robust cor­pus cal­lo­sum, the “tough body” whose mil­lions of fibers pro­mote com­mu­ni­ca­tion and con­nec­tion.)

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Rewire Your Brain in 6 Weeks: A BBC Reporter Explores How Every­day Life Changes Can Alter Our Brains

The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT

The “Brain Dic­tio­nary”: Beau­ti­ful 3D Map Shows How Dif­fer­ent Brain Areas Respond to Hear­ing Dif­fer­ent Words

A Mas­sive, Knit­ted Tapes­try of the Galaxy: Soft­ware Engi­neer Hacks a Knit­ting Machine & Cre­ates a Star Map Fea­tur­ing 88 Con­stel­la­tions

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er.

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One-in-70-Trillion: An Evolutionary Biologist Explains the Mind-Bending Probability of Our Existence

in Biology, Science | August 8th, 2025

At a 1998 con­fer­ence on tech­nol­o­gy and life, The Hitch­hik­er’s Guide to the Galaxy author Dou­glas Adams once pro­posed the notion of a sen­tient pud­dle. Imag­ine it “wak­ing up one morn­ing and think­ing, ‘This is an inter­est­ing world I find myself in — an inter­est­ing hole I find myself in — fits me rather neat­ly, does­n’t it? In fact, it fits me stag­ger­ing­ly well, must have been made to have me in it!’ ” No mat­ter how much intel­li­gence it may some­how have attained, this pud­dle does­n’t real­ize that its shape was dic­tat­ed by its envi­ron­ment, not the oth­er way around. Nor does it seem to real­ize on just how many fac­tors its very exis­tence is con­tin­gent; to its mind, this is a pud­dle’s world, and the rest of us are just liv­ing in it.

Of course, the rest of us are in just the same sit­u­a­tion. In the 70-minute Big Think video above, evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­men­tal biol­o­gist Sean B. Car­roll puts our pres­ence on Earth in per­spec­tive, begin­ning with the var­i­ous fac­tors that hap­pened to con­verge to make com­plex life pos­si­ble on this plan­et at all. “A huge num­ber of things had to go right for our species to exist, and for each of us indi­vid­u­al­ly to exist,” he says, and that’s true on “the cos­mo­log­i­cal scale, the geo­log­i­cal scale, and the bio­log­i­cal scale.”

One impor­tant event is the aster­oid impact that “reset” life on Earth 66 mil­lion years ago, which trig­gered a grad­ual cool­ing of the plan­et, and anoth­er was the tec­ton­ic move­ment that pushed togeth­er what we now know as Asia and the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent. A result of these and oth­er unlike­ly occur­rences was the “bios­phere” in which we and all oth­er extant species live today.

What about you and me in par­tic­u­lar? Nei­ther of us, as Car­roll tells it here and in his book A Series of For­tu­nate Events: Chance and the Mak­ing of the Plan­et, Life, and You, should feel that our place was guar­an­teed. In human repro­duc­tion, when two par­ents get togeth­er and “that one lucky sperm makes it and com­bines with that one egg at that moment, that’s about a one-in-70-tril­lion event, genet­i­cal­ly speak­ing.” This can be dif­fi­cult to inter­nal­ize, since our own exis­tence is all we’ve ever known, in the man­ner of Adams’ sen­tient pud­dle. Even “as the sun ris­es in the sky and the air heats up and as, grad­u­al­ly, the pud­dle gets small­er and small­er,” it con­tin­ues “fran­ti­cal­ly hang­ing on to the notion that every­thing’s going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it.” There’s a les­son for human­i­ty in that sto­ry, and one that has­n’t become any less urgent in the past 27 years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er “Jour­ney of the Uni­verse,” a Mul­ti­me­dia Project That Explores Humanity’s Place in the Epic His­to­ry of the Cos­mos

The His­to­ry of the Earth (All 4.5 Bil­lion Years) in 1 Hour: A Mil­lion Years Cov­ered Every Sec­ond

Big His­to­ry: David Chris­t­ian Cov­ers 13.7 Bil­lion Years of His­to­ry in 18 Min­utes

An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth by Com­man­der Chris Had­field: The Viral Book Trail­er

Who’s Out There?: Orson Welles Nar­rates a Doc­u­men­tary Ask­ing Whether There’s Extrater­res­tri­al Life in the Uni­verse (1975)

Carl Sagan Presents a Mini-Course on Earth, Mars & What’s Beyond Our Solar Sys­tem: For Kids and Adults (1977)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

 

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How Eyes Evolved: A Fascinating Tour Through the Animal Kingdom

in Biology | May 2nd, 2025

Above, Lars Schmitz, a pro­fes­sor at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege, guides us “through a giant tree of life map­ping the evo­lu­tion of eyes in the ani­mal king­dom: how they work, why they’ve tak­en the form they have, and the evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tages they’ve unlocked across species.” The video comes cour­tesy of Wired. It’s 36 min­utes and down­right fas­ci­nat­ing.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Ani­mals Laugh Too: UCLA Study Finds Laugh­ter in 65 Species, from Rats to Cows

16,000 Pages of Charles Darwin’s Writ­ing on Evo­lu­tion Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an 8‑Minute Ani­ma­tion

Free Online Biol­o­gy Cours­es

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