Children ranging from 4 to 8years (n=39) reported whether they could imagine various improbable phenomena (e.g., a person making onion juice) as well as various impossible phenomena (e.g., a person turning an onion into a banana) and then described what they imagined. In their descriptions, children mentioned ordinary causes much more often than extraordinary causes. Descriptions of such ordina...

DNA sequencing and hence genomics have been transformed over the last decade by the commercialization of inexpensive, massively parallel, short-read sequencing technology. Nonetheless, a new generation of singlemolecule DNA sequencers, which uses nanopore technology, is initiating a further upheaval in genomics. These instruments are portable, capable of reads of 100 kb, cheap, and fast. Nanopo...

This article critically examines the ways in which the trope of prosthesis has been used in recent theory to understand human-technology relationships. Analyzing the trope from a number of angles, including disability, factory labor practices, mass production, and marketing, the author scrutinizes ways in which technologies are simultaneously wounding and enabling in ways for which the prosthes...

Three fundamental systems of communication are defined: information, explanation and imagination. Information is based on analytic distinctions between objects in the world. Explanatory communication provides knowledge through discourse, narration, logic, rhetoric and other forms of systemic elaboration. Intellectual discovery relies on a third system of communication, that of imagination. Rath...