Life

Michelle Obama teams up with Walmart to fight obesity and bring down the cost of healthy food. But the problems of processed food emerged from yesterday's answers to questions of purity, safety, and health; will the future be any different? The latest in our series on the science and technology of food, co-produced with GOOD.

Jonah Lehrer asks what happens in the brain to give music the kind of unique, uncanny power that Ton Koopman's organ performance exudes in spades. Video and quotes after the jump.

Microbiologists have discovered a simple kind of farming in the simplest social organisms�cooperative amoeba.

Wasteful predation might not be a mistake for the occasionally post-coitally cannibalistic black widow spider. Instead, having extra food around may help put a skittish potential mate's fears to rest.

A wintry forest looks picturesque, but slow-motion violence hides in the frame rate.

A hypnagogic animation of mathematical imagery prompts thoughts of spinning fractal symmetries and the history of life on Earth. Video after the jump.

In a lodge in the shadow of New Hampshire's Mount Washington, reading tales of the summit's almost-implausibly calamitous past.

Robust and primitive, is the GIF the nematode of online imagery? it's as if C. elegans had swum down through the aeons to intersect with an image-making format engineered to express its qualities.

G. K. Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth."

GOOD's Nicola Twilley wonders how the industrial analysis of qualities like texture, consistency, and juiciness will transform age-old culinary cultures, in the second in a joint series exploring the science and technology of food.