One of my favorite zoologist habits is to gesture on one's own body when describing an animal's anatomy. The weirder the animal, the funnier the implicit analogy.

"These worms have a ventral nerve cord," I explain, drawing a line from my collarbone to my navel. "This mollusc has gills on its dorsal surface," reaching over one shoulder to pat my back.

Easy to do in front of a class, harder on the printed page. There we rely on diagrams to indicate dorsal (top), ventral (bottom), anterior (front), and posterior (back). For example, here's a squid:

A good part of basic research in fundamental physics focuses on the definition, the prediction, and the measurement of quantities which put the current theory -the standard model- to the test in the most stringent way possible. The choice of the quantities on which to base our comparisons between theory prediction and measurement is critical: it entails understanding what may make the comparison imprecise (i.e. experimental systematics affecting the measurement) or fruitless (i.e. theoretical assumptions or a bad definition of the quantity to measure).

One clear example, which I used last week in my lessons of Subnuclear Physics to undergraduates in Padova, is the measurement of the W and Z boson cross sections at the Tevatron proton-antiproton collider.

Recently I was interviewed by Pouria Nazemi, Science Editor of the Jam-e-Jam Daily Newspaper.  Jam-e-Jam is the principal Iranian newspaper and is controlled by the government.  In the wake of Iran shutting down its leading business newspaper last week and three pro-reform newspapers in October I thought this would be interesting to readers, since it appeared between these two events.

In an earlier article titled What is Life?, I took the reader through a reasoning process to finally arrive at the conclusion that, contrary to general expectation, finding a definition of life is not an overwhelmingly difficult problem at all because life  is a remarkably simple concept – independent spontaneous cooperation.
I think that finding a definition has been seen as difficult because those considering it have confused the definition with the underlying significance of life, which some might call life’s purpose, when the two are almost separate questions.
This confusion, this perception that life is just too hard to explain, has reduced our most inspiring thinkers to the status of mere mortals.