In Zimbabwe: A trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about serious money.

It had been clear to Dianne Whyne that something bad was happening in Mexico for several weeks. But on a Friday—April 24, to be exact—Whyne, who is director of operations for the Johns Hopkins Office of Critical Event Preparedness and Response (CEPAR), learned just how severe and potentially devastating the spread of influenza A strain […]

New research indicates that engaging children in the arts stimulates regions of the brain that involve all types of learning.

Pity the poor medical consumer. An endless stream of “information”—a world’s worth of ostensible cures and regimens—spews out of televisions and computer screens at him, much of it dubious, some flat-out wrong.

The mind of historian Philip DeArmond Curtin ranged widely and thrived on interaction—the interaction of cultures and the interaction of academic disciplines.

One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)

The systematic didacting of oneself—it’s not a verb, but it ought to be—requires printed text bound between boards. Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, or an iSquint will not suffice. And because we subscribe to the advice of Isaac Watts in his 1741 volume Improvement of the Mind—“It is of vast advantage to have the most proper books for reading recommended by a judicious friend”—we consulted a roster of judicious friends to compile some required reading for an autodidact’s course catalog. (The course titles and descriptions are our invention.) We grade on the curve and will allow you to set your own pace, but do proceed with one last piece of advice from the good Mr. Watts: “Have a care of indulging the more sensual passions and appetites of animal nature; they are great enemies to attention.” Your summer of beach reading is over. It’s back to school, even for the self-taught.

Reader, didact thyself!

As the nation’s nonprofits feel the pinch of the current economy, a Johns Hopkins researcher says the “resilient sector” will adapt and survive. In fact, it may even thrive. – It’s tough to log on to the Internet or pick up a newspaper (if you can still find one) these days without being deluged with […]

Malaria kills more than one million people worldwide each year, most of them young children. Backed by new money and renewed interest in stopping this eternal killer, researchers at Johns Hopkins are working on several fronts to stop it. Their main experimental subject: the bloodthirsty mosquito. – She comes out at night, flying out of […]

Scientists battling the malaria parasite and its protean ability to mutate face a centuries-old dilemma: As surely as new drugs are introduced as “cures” for malaria, the genome of the parasite changes just enough to make those new drugs ineffective, or marginally viable tools with which to fight the disease. The irony is that, lacking […]

As a young PhD candidate in biochemistry in India, Nirbhay Kumar was felled by chills, sweats, and fever—the calling cards of malaria. He had been infected with Plasmodium vivax, a mild yet debilitating form of the disease. “I was very sick, but vivax doesn’t lead to cerebral malaria,” he says. “Maybe that’s why I’m still […]