Surveying the whole scope of human history vis-à-vis food, a couple of themes emerge. One is that humans like their…

On September 14, 2015, signals from one of the Universe’s most mind-boggling, powerful events produced the tiniest…

I come not to bury J.K. Rowling, but to praise her. Harry Potter was an honest to god phenomenon, impacting my…

If you sat down to eat at any point and in any part of the U.S. in the 1800s, nothing on your plate was quite what…

Somewhere between a second and a millennium from now, you will die. Your body and all of its parts will cease…

The World Wide Web is officially old enough for us judge what it’s produced. That’s right, it’s time for the world…

Wrangle up the right studies and you can make anything look deadly. Breakfast cereal—at least, the kind without…

John Coster-Mullen was driving his truck to a warehouse in Oshkosh, Wisconsin when he told me that he owns uranium.…

You’ve just booted up a game on a state-of-the-art quantum computer. You’re running 19 superconducting quantum bits…

After a recent trip to her local dispensary, my mom recalled how, when she was young, black-market cannabis was…

N 47.51575°, W 123.52133°—Amid the panoply of greenery that makes up the Hoh Rainforest, a gap in the old growth…

At the peak of summer, when just walking to and from the corner store necessitates a shower and a change of clothes,…

The modern age has brought one of the most nightmarish inventions in all of human history—the atomic bomb. These…

“If I gave two fucks - two fucks about streaming numbers, would have put Lemonade up on Spotify,” Beyoncé proclaims…

For 15 years, Erez Benari’s struggle with his type 2 diabetes had been a losing one. A software engineer at…

At the beating heart of Amazon’s unstoppable ecommerce expansion is a very basic promise: jobs.

It was a Friday evening in 1975, and Woody Wise was driving from Los Angeles to Palm Springs, with his two kids in…

Animal rights activists have done stellar work in foregrounding the question of creature-consciousness: no…

Animals fatally maul, sting, trample, and chew about a million humans per year. Pretty nice of them, given the…

Two decades of healthy growth, followed by four to eight decades of slow-motion physical and mental collapse—that’s…