Issue 112: Inspiration (3)

It’s 2050. The world population has increased by 2.3 billion to 9.9 billion. Demand for food has risen 70 to 100 percent but a warming planet, extreme weather, and a decrease in arable land is threatening food security. Luckily, farmers can grow crops more densely, increasing yield from smaller plots of available agricultural land.Packing crops so tightly wouldn’t have been possible three decades earlier....

Two years ago, I decided to do nothing. Not for the rest of my life, of course—for two hours. As a neuroscientist, I was already familiar with the evidence that mindfulness meditation, or attending to the present moment, is beneficial for stress and anxiety. So I had been meditating regularly for about a half a year, looking to enhance my practice. And although I...

You’re confronting a spider, up close, womano-a-womano. The tiny creature rears back on its hindmost legs and assumes a threatening posture, ridiculous given that you could easily squash it with your shoe. Yet everyone understands the gesture, even though to locate the most recent common ancestor shared by the two of you, you’d have to go back roughly half a billion years. The basic...