Sublime

As a physicist thinking about aging and death it was natural not only to ask about possible mechanisms for why we age and why we die but, equally important, to ask where the scale of human life span comes from. Why hasn’t anybody lived for more than 123 years?

after only about two inhales, “the receptors in your nose sort of switch off.” Having decided that an odor isn’t threatening, we stop paying attention to it.

Animal

The historian Anne Applebaum’s book on the Holodomor, Red Famine, documents stories of desperate peasants resorting to eating leather and rodents, grass, and, in states of starvation-induced mania, even their own children. All of this occurred in one of the most fertile grain-production regions in the world.

inert.

Juliette nodded and loosened the belt from around Marnes’s neck. The flesh was purple beneath it. She felt for a pulse, remembering Roger looking just like this when she’d found him down in Mechanical, completely still and unresponsive. It took her a moment to be sure that she was looking at the second dead body she had ever seen.

In clever vertebrates, such as mammals and birds, it is thought that a corpse represents a real cognitive challenge: the dead body looks like a member of your species, even an individual you know well, but it does not react. It should be alive and moving, and yet it is still, inert. The conflicting stimuli provoke strong emotional responses, and th