At least once a year, Cosmo’s cover story is about how to have better, longer sex: a turgid treatise on positions and anatomy.  Our finest ladies’ mags are ignoring the obvious.

To improve the mating of our species, we must learn from the mistakes of garden spiders and band together to end sexual cannibalism once and for all.  

Female Argiope spiders only want what all of us want—the upper hand in the war of the sexes.  But your friendly neighborhood garden spider has more at stake than the proper replacement of the toilet seat. 

On the occasion of her centennial, Rita Levi-Montalcini addressed the crowd with the gentle tone of a grandmother and the confident cadence of a statesman.  At 100 years, she has an energy that many younger people might envy.  She divides her workdays between her namesake brain research laboratory and her foundation to encourage African women with potential for scientific achievement.  These dual pursuits are fitting of a woman who fought past the setbacks of her own time and culture to become a driving force in both medical research and the politics of science.

When want to understand something complex, we make something similar but simpler - a model.  Models in engineering re-imagine complex structures as sticks, strings, and hinges.  Biology uses simpler living systems, like yeast and mice.  But plenty of scientific questions defy our tried-and-true modeling strategies.  If a system is too complex or too slow for us to accurately simplify, we must wait for a model to present itself.