Risky Business: The Teenage Brain

“Nothing—whether it’s being with your friends, having sex, licking an ice cream cone, zipping along in a convertible on a warm summer evening, hearing your favorite music—will ever feel as good as it did when you were a teenager,” says Laurence Steinberg, a professor of psychology at Temple University. From weak frontal lobes to enlarged nucleus accumbens and extra more dopamine receptors, adolescents’ brains are …

It’s Time to Quit Lettuce

Calling lettuce “the bottled water of produce,” Gizmodo has snappily outlined a few very pragmatic reasons why it’s time to quit the Iceberg. Not only is it labor-intensive and comes wrapped in a bunch of unnecessary plastic, it also contains a huge amount of water—and 80% of the USA’s lettuce is grown in drought-ridden California. On top of the environmentally unfriendly facts, it turns out …

CH25: Tal Danino

The bioengineer who programs DNA to fight cancer

Programming bacteria to sniff out and treat cancer. It may sound like something out of the future, but it’s exactly what Tal Danino is doing right now. A bioengineer, TED Fellow and postdoctoral fellow at MIT, Danino specializes in manipulating the DNA of probiotics to turn them into a diagnostic and treatment tool. “What we can do inside the lab is use machines that print …