Rorotoko: scholars, artists and thinkers on their own work, in their own words

Sometimes, to understand the whole horse, you need to see one muscle at a time.

Knowing where a muscle attaches is not the same as being able to picture it. An illustrator makes the case for giving the eye one structure to follow at a time, so that the dense plates of the great anatomical atlases become easier to read rather than less necessary.

Myology of the Horse – Muscle by Muscle

Four footprints finally give an adult Tyrannosaurus rex a walking pace.

Four huge three-toed footprints in North Dakota, 66.5 million years old, can only belong to an adult Tyrannosaurus rex. They show a brisk walk of about four miles an hour, with feet placed in a narrow line.

T. rex takes a walk

Davis’s pioneering study of “normal” women’s sexuality ignited the nation’s first sexual revolution, inspired the second, and informs ongoing activism.

Before Kinsey, and before Masters and Johnson, there was the founding mother of American sex research. More than a century ago, in the shadow of the Comstock Laws, her study of 2,200 women documented contraception, abortion, orgasm and lesbian relationships among "average" women, and set off the nation's first sexual revolution.

Matters of Sex: Katharine Bement Davis and America’s First Sexual Revolution

Once the pollinators go, we'll all go with them

A rewilder who supercharges nature and the dairy farmer next door who cannot see the point. Why humor, not finger-pointing, is the way to move people with fixed opinions.

Derek vs Derek

As degrees proliferate and intelligence cheapens, students must recognize merit alongside increasingly influential nonmeritocratic factors.

A degree no longer guarantees a good job as higher education expands and automation reshapes work. Schools teach only part of the rules, and students may need a dual awareness: valuing effort while seeing the forces that shape their chances.

Disillusionment With Meritocracy During the Transition to Adulthood: Longitudinal Change in Belief Systems and Depression in China

The more we learn about amoebas, the smarter they seem.

On the deep seafloor sit single-celled organisms the size of cauliflowers that fall apart when you dredge them up. In ponds, shelled amoebas sort sand grains and broken diatom husks by size and shape, glue them into a gapless mosaic, and finish in under an hour — with no nervous system, by means nobody can explain. Software, liquid metal robots and analog computers have all tried to imitate the trick and none come close.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell

Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember, and communicate.

The scientists at the heart of the film have reached a wide public with the idea that plants cooperate and recognize kin. That reach has drawn fierce pushback from peers, from calls to defund the research to attacks that drove one of them from the field.

Understory

Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Reefs have no growth rings. A pair of shell valves still joined at the hinge is how researchers date a reef's foundation, and the oldest living ones turn out to be nearly two thousand years old.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change