« How the West Was Won Again »

How the quest was won

Not long after Jim Watson's The Double Helix appeared, there was talk about making a movie about the DNA story. The author of the book took this very seriously and did not find all the many suggestions made to him very helpful. One idea put forward was that Jim should be played by Woody Allen and Francis Crick by Peter O'Toole. Another was to do it as a musical with a dance based on the entwini...

Won For All: How the Drosophila Genome Was Sequenced

In The Strongest Boy’s title essay, Reilly tells the story of a German newborn whose strangely muscled physique is due to a frame shift mutation in the aforementioned muscle inhibitor, myostatin. As a result, his 7-month-old thighs look like those of a miniscule Lance Armstrong. His mother, a heterozygote and professional athlete, already has hidden him from public view, shielding him from scru...

How ‘Nothing Works’ Was Won: The End of Treatment and Fracturing of the Asylum

How Infectious Was #Deflategate?

On Monday January 19, 2015 a story broke that the National Football League (NFL) had started an investigation into whether the New England Patriots deliberately deflated the footballs they used during their championship win over the Indianapolis Colts. Like an infectious disease, discussion regarding Deflategate grew rapidly on social media sites in the hours and days after the release of the s...

How Was Your Day?

We describe a ‘How was your day?’ (HWYD) Companion whose purpose is to establish a comforting and supportive relationship with a user via a conversation on a variety of work-related topics. The system has several fairly novel features aimed at increasing the naturalness of the interaction: a rapid ‘short loop’ response primed by the results of acoustic emotion analysis, and an ‘interruption man...