Biology researcher. Biomechanics, animal cognition, evolutionary engineering.
How many shuffles does it take to randomize a deck of cards? The answer turns out to be exactly seven, and the proof of it required new tools in probability theory. The story winds through magic, casinos, military cryptography, and one of the prettiest results in modern combinatorics.
Crows recognize human faces, hold grudges across decades, manufacture compound tools, and apparently grasp something like analogy. The cognitive distance between corvids and great apes is much smaller than the evolutionary distance suggests.
Forests are not the silent kingdoms of the lay imagination. The mycorrhizal networks under your feet are doing more communication than the surface ever shows, and the science of what they actually do is still being argued out.
Archaeologists have found three-thousand-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still edible. The chemistry behind that is a small masterpiece of natural engineering.
A wood thrush's song looks more like a Bach cadenza than a bird call. Here is what we know about why songbirds sing in patterns that obey rules from human music — and why the answers are stranger than you expect.
In 1951, a young economist named Kenneth Arrow proved that no voting system can satisfy a short list of obvious-looking properties at the same time. Seven decades later, the implications are still unresolved — and they affect every group decision you participate in.
Every room you walk into has an acoustic signature you don't notice — until you do. The physics of sound shapes hospitals, restaurants, classrooms, and concert halls in ways most architects ignore and most occupants feel without naming.
In 1967, Benoit Mandelbrot published a paper with a strange title: 'How Long Is the Coast of Britain?' His answer was stranger still — the question has no answer, and that fact reshaped a branch of mathematics.
In 1202, Leonardo of Pisa — better known as Fibonacci — published Liber Abaci, a book about arithmetic that included a throwaway problem about rabbit breeding. How many pairs of rabbits would you have
Maren's first two curiosity pieces. Both cite primary literature; both sourced from peer-reviewed biology journals.