Article archive
Published news and blog articles, organized by category. Browse older coverage by month or search for a topic. Undated blog guides appear after dated news.
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What hearing teaches us about the world
Hearing reveals a world that is physical but never delivered raw: the brain selects sources, fills gaps and uses context to turn pressure changes into a shared environment.
Dreaming explained: the ideas that matter
Dream science is less a single answer than a set of useful distinctions: REM is not identical to dreaming, dream content is not a codebook, and a compelling story is not the same as a tested mechanism.
How dreams work
A dream feels like a private film, but its machinery is public biology: cycling sleep stages, shifting neuromodulators, active memory networks and a brain that must build a coherent scene from incomplete signals.
How the gut immune system works
A practical tour of gut immunity: barriers, sensors, lymphoid sites, secretory IgA and microbiota work together to defend the intestine without attacking every harmless encounter.
How the vestibular system works
A practical tour of the inner-ear sensors, neural reflexes, and multisensory computations that keep a moving body oriented.
The engineering challenge behind dreaming
To influence a dream, an engineer must first detect a fragile internal state without waking the sleeper, then intervene precisely and measure what changed. The hard part is not the gadget; it is the closed loop.
The engineering challenge behind the gut immune system
Viewed as an engineering problem, gut immunity is distributed control under uncertainty: barriers, sensors, signals, antibodies and repair loops must protect tissue without destroying a useful ecosystem.
The engineering challenge behind the vestibular system
The inner ear solves a hard sensing problem: estimate orientation and motion from tiny fluid forces while the body itself is constantly moving.
The gut immune system explained: the ideas that matter
Six organizing ideas make gut immunity easier to understand: a selective barrier, active tolerance, contextual danger, compartmentalized control, microbial feedback and memory.
The hidden history of dreaming
Dreams have moved from omens and messages to objects of measurement. The history is not a clean march toward certainty; it is a record of changing instruments, theories and definitions of evidence.
The hidden history of the gut immune system
The history of gut immunology is a story of changing questions: from locating lymphoid structures to explaining oral tolerance, IgA transport, immune-cell homing and the microbiome as an immune partner.
The hidden history of the vestibular system
The balance organ was visible long before its function was understood; its history is a story of anatomy, animal experiments, and a Nobel-winning diagnostic insight.
The vestibular system explained: the ideas that matter
Forget the jargon first. The essential ideas are rotation, translation, comparison, reflexes, and an internal model of where the body is in space.
What dreaming teaches us about the world
Dreaming is a nightly experiment in perception without ordinary sensory input. It shows how a brain can generate a world, test emotional possibilities and make meaning—while also warning us how easily meaning can outrun evidence.
What the gut immune system teaches us about the world
The gut immune system offers broader lessons about selective boundaries, distributed governance, ecological interdependence, feedback and resilience under constant exchange.
What the vestibular system teaches us about the world
The inner ear is a lesson in perception: the brain does not receive reality directly; it builds a workable world-model from partial, noisy signals.
Bone remodeling explained: the ideas that matter
Six ideas make bone remodeling easier to understand: living matrix, cellular roles, coupling, loading, mineral balance, and limits.
How bone remodeling works
A clear tour of the cellular cycle that continually removes, replaces, and tunes living bone.
How the placebo effect works
A placebo is inert as a drug, yet the meaning around a treatment can recruit expectation, learning, attention, and body regulation. The mechanism is not magic; it is a change in the conditions under which symptoms are generated and…
How wound healing works
A cut is not repaired by one magic switch. It is closed, defended, rebuilt and remodeled by overlapping phases that coordinate blood, immune cells, matrix and skin.
The engineering challenge behind bone remodeling
Bone remodeling is a biological control problem: remove enough to repair, build enough to strengthen, and never destabilize the structure.
The engineering challenge behind the placebo effect
A placebo-controlled trial is a piece of experimental engineering: it must isolate a treatment’s specific action while preserving enough of the surrounding experience to make the comparison fair. The hard part is controlling context…
The engineering challenge behind wound healing
Wound healing behaves like a distributed control system with competing objectives: seal a breach quickly, defend it, rebuild structure, and avoid turning protection into permanent damage.
The hidden history of bone remodeling
Bone renewal is a modern name for an ancient biological bargain between damage, repair, mineral storage, and movement.
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