Periodic table of Death

Even though this article is only gold adjacent, we need to talk about gold. Not the kind you find in a pirate’s chest (cue Dead Men Tell No Tales) or the coin of my heart, the American St. Gaudens Double Eagle, 1907-1933 (my birthday is coming up …), but the kind that underpinned the world’s money for centuries. For the better part of American history, the U.S. dollar was as good as gold—literally. You could, in theory, march into a bank with A Fistful of Dollars (Ennio Morricone, anyone?) and demand they hand over a handful of shiny yellow metal in exchange. This was …

A Recently Discovered Hitchcockian Screenplay Genre: Horror/Mystery Tone: Suspenseful and Eerily Educational Scene 1/INTERIOR: THE RAYN BEAU 🌈 MOTEL – NIGHT A dilapidated motel sign flickers in the rain. The camera pans to Room 3, where MERRYAN RAYN, 28, sharp-eyed and skeptical, had just stepped into the shower. Her boyfriend, CAM BLOOMIS, 32, a geologist with a knack for doomscrolling EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) bulletins, clutches a Geiger counter and a folder labeled “RADON IS BAD FOR YOU.” He creeps into the bathroom, backlit by the bedroom light, his shadow slowly looming over the shower curtain … He rips back the curtain, raises the Geiger’s probe …  …

You’re deep in the forest, pleasantly exhausted after a long hike, absorbing the whisper of wind through towering evergreens and the distant vistas of dazzling snow-capped peaks. Away from digital noise, nature heals your overwhelmed mind and soothes your tattered soul. It’s a “touch grass” moment. You connect to the world around you by running your fingers over the rough bark of a thousand-year-old tree or trailing them through an icy stream where the water is so crystal clear, you can count every rounded stone. At camp, with the crackle of a fire warming your back, the golden light of the setting …

Boron = boring? That’s kinda-sorta why this atomic element didn’t get attention earlier in the Periodic Table of Death and Mystery series. Boron literally never came up in organic or biochemistry. It’s considered nonessential for human life (1) based on the biochemist’s periodic table, and it’s not even in my generic once-a-day vitamin and they include selenium(6). That doesn’t mean boron (B) isn’t important in human history, past, present, and future. It is. Boron was originally found as evaporates, including in the complex salt, sodium borate (Na2H20B4O17) (3), better known as borax. As early as 300 A.D., the Chinese employed …

“Evolutionary mismatch” is a concept developed in the field of evolutionary psychology. The concept postulates that human brains are wired for conditions that no longer exist. That “we have stone-age brains in modern environments,” and our primitive brains still drive our behaviors (1, 2). But what does it mean to have a “Stone Age” brain? You’ve probably heard the term Stone Age before, especially if you ever watched the Flintstones (3). It’s a dated term that applies to a period ~2.5 million to 5000 years ago, when humans made and used stone tools. It’s also when our brain size, structure, …

We use idioms in language all the time. “Don’t cut corners is a good rule of thumb.” “You missed the boat on that one and it’s the last straw.” “She’s normally fit as a fiddle, but under the weather today” (1). Idioms are expressions that have a completely different meaning than the literal words because how weird would it be for it to be “raining cats and dogs”? But most idioms used today have historical origins (2). If you “make the grade”, it means you’ve succeeded. But originally it had to do with whether a train locomotive could pull its …