As 2019 comes to a close, we'd like to wish our members and followers a safe and happy holiday season. And, in the spirit of reflection, we'd like to provide Weekly Brainwave readers a look at the year's most engaging articles. Our regular publication will resume Jan. 7.

Quanta Magazine

From April 9: A long-standing puzzle seems to constrain how addition and multiplication relate to each other. A graduate student has gone further than anyone else in establishing the connection.

Inc.

From Sept. 10: The English language is a joy to behold, but a beast to learn. In addition to its numerous irregularities, there's a plethora of phrases and idioms that seem to make no sense to non-native speakers.

Aeon

From Aug. 27: We credit Socrates with the insight that "the unexamined life is not worth living" and that to ‘"know thyself" is the path to true wisdom. But is there a right and a wrong way to go about such self-reflection?

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Inc.

From Aug. 6: This is a story about the study of happiness, the key thing that stops most of us from getting more of it, and the most recent science that suggests the one simple habit we should all adopt. We begin with the Study of Adult Development at Harvard Medical School.

The New York Times

From April 2: She'd been told that childbirth was going to be painful. But as the hours wore on, nothing bothered her — even without an epidural. "I could feel that my body was changing, but it didn't hurt me," recalled the woman, Jo Cameron, who is now 71. She likened it to "a tickle." Later, she would tell prospective mothers, "Don't worry, it's not as bad as people say it is." It was only recently — more than four decades later — that she learned her friends were not exaggerating.

The Atlantic

From Nov. 26: By migrating in huge herds, bison behave like a force of nature, engineering and intensifying waves of spring greenery that other grazers rely on.

Artsy

From Sept. 24: When the disgraced health entrepreneur Elizabeth Holmes was indicted on fraud charges for her lab-testing company Theranos last year, much of the media discussion rested not on her alleged corporate recklessness and staggering abuses of trust, but on her sartorial choices: black jackets, black slacks, and—most importantly—black turtlenecks.

Inc.

From Nov. 12: Recently, a colleague and I were lamenting the process of growing older and the inevitable increasing difficulty of remembering things we want to remember. That becomes particularly annoying when you attend a conference or a learning seminar and find yourself forgetting the entire session just days later.

Cnet

From May 7: In a subterranean laboratory, about a mile below Italy's Gran Sasso mountains, scientists are hunting for dark matter using an incredibly powerful detector full of liquid xenon. In their search for the elusive particle, they observed something else entirely. Their dark matter detector witnessed the rarest event ever recorded: the radioactive decay of xenon-124.