In six to 60 words (haikus welcome), tell us what makes you happy. We’ll print selected responses in the “What Makes You Happy?” feature in our HAPPINESS issue this fall. Just fill out the form below, and we’ll be in touch. (Photo: Creative Commons licensed from flickr user Éole.) // <![CDATA[ var host = (("https:" […]

Solutions to Golomb’s Gambits

Melanoma is relatively rare, accounting for only 3 percent of skin cancer cases nationwide. But it leads to 75 percent of all skin cancer deaths. Each year 70,000 Americans are diagnosed with the disease, and though curable if found early, it kills one in eight patients, many within six to nine months of diagnosis. Physicians […]

Musical improvisation looks so straightforward: Simply take your instrument and make something up. Timothy Murphy, Peab ’84 (MMA), says it’s not quite that simple. A keyboardist and Peabody Conservatory faculty member, Murphy also tours and records as a jazz musician who has practiced improvisation for years. He prefers to do so in a band. “Playing […]

Crossword-style definitions are given for each word in each of the following sets of words. The words in each set are permutations (anagrams) of the same letters. Starred words are uncommon. A. A set of five letters 1. Analyze grammatically 2. Asparagus unit 3. Precedes moi or ski 4. Fraction of a Turkish piaster* 5. […]

Why do expensive hobbies inspire silly names? Prompting that question was a midwinter professional trip to a warm place with a stay in a hotel next to a marina. Never having spent time next to a marina, I was fascinated by the yachts—by their price (entry level seemed to be $750,000); by the fact that […]

Locals were inventing terms like “Snowpocalypse” and “Snowmageddon” to describe the twin blizzards that pounded Baltimore with a historic amount of snow and shut the city down for several days in February. The two storms together dumped 51.7 inches of flakes on the Homewood campus, doing their part to make this winter the snowiest on […]

A Hopkins physicist documents the search for the key to the universe. David Kaplan builds theoretical models to explain how elementary forces and particles might work. He researches “dark matter,” the mysterious stuff that makes up as much as 25 percent of the universe, though no one understands why. He has a lengthy and deep […]

Johns Hopkins’ latest Nobelist shares her opinion on how curiosity is the driving force behind research.

A. It is often easy to add a letter inside a short word to form a very different new word. Thus CAT can be lengthened to CHAT or CART or CAST, etc. There are fewer choices, and often none at all, for lengthening a long word. In the following, you get a clue for the […]