What Deathbed Visions Teach Us About Living

This is not only powerful material for thought, it’s also compelling storytelling. At the time, only a handful of published medical studies had documented deathbed visions, and they largely relied on secondhand reports from doctors and other caregivers rather than accounts from patients themselves. On a flight home from a conference, Kerr outlined a study…

Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships, Northeastern University researchers say

A new study from researchers at Northeastern University, in collaboration with scientists from MIT and the University of Glasgow, investigated what happened when a group of domesticated birds were taught to call one another on tablets and smartphones. The results suggest that video calls could help parrots approximate birds’ communication in the wild, improving their…

My Polish grandmother used to bake these cookies, which my wife picked up at a Ukranian festival. They’re apparently called nut horns. Hadn’t tasted them for 30 years.

My grandmother shaped them a little differently, more like segments of a sphere… the name I must have given them in my childhood is just “powdered sugar crescent cookies.” She packed them in a tin with chocolate chip , oatmeal raisin, fork-impressed peanut butter, and maybe sugar cookies? I would have made a beeline for her…

Unearthing a Long Ignored African Writing System, One Researcher Finds African History, by Africans

Not only is this a fantastic story about language and culture and colonialism, it’s also a great example of how a talented PR writer used journalistic storytelling strategies to turn a scholarly study into an appealing narrative. We start with a very specific, very personal story about a man returning home for his father’s funeral.…