Matter | Aliens
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Chapter one
Opening Lines
Culture | Philosophy
The Big Bang Is Hard Science. It Is Also a Creation Story.
Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths.
Ideas | Philosophy
To Understand Religion, Think Football
Sacred beliefs likely arose out of prehistoric bonding and rituals.
Biology | Evolution
The Unique Merger That Made You (and Ewe, and Yew)
All sophisticated life on the planet Earth may owe its existence to one freakish event.
Chapter two
Beginning of the End
Culture | Psychology
The Original Natural Born Killers
In the 1920s, two murderers were defended by science. The infamous case still echoes.
Biology | Health
At Death’s Door, He Was Put on Ice
How a new technology is resurrecting patients from what was once certain death.
Ideas | Health
How World of Warcraft Might Help Head Off the Next Pandemic
Gamers are giving scientists insights into how people react to a plague.
Biology | Health
A Deadly Virus Is Arrested in the Middle East
Halting a MERS pandemic may hold lessons for the Ebola crisis—until the next outbreak.
Chapter three
Life Finds a Way
Matter | Earth Science
In Search of Life’s Smoking Gun
A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.
Biology | Linguistics
The Family That Couldn’t Say Hippopotamus
The origins of language are not what inherited disorders seemed to suggest.
Biology | Reproduction
How a Zebra Mussel Convinced Me To Get a Vasectomy
“It’s amazing what we let our teachers teach us.”
Biology | Evolution
The Greatest Animal War
Competition in Cambrian seas helped cause an explosion in diversity.
Chapter four
Out of Nowhere
Biology | Evolution
Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard
In Ethiopia, paleontologists are pushing back the clock on humanity’s origins.
Biology | Environment
The Wild, Secret Life of New York City
Get back to nature, right in your own neighborhood.
Culture | Sociology
Why We Keep Playing the Lottery
Blind to the mathematical odds, we fall to the marketing gods.
Matter | Physics
Ingenious: Paul J. Steinhardt
The Princeton physicist on what’s wrong with inflation theory and his view of the Big Bang.
Chapter five
The Fall 2014 Quarterly
Ideas
The Distant Future, 30 Years On
The Fall 2014 Quarterly looks ahead.
Ideas | Environment
Nature, Pixelated
With our brains plugged into virtual worlds all day, what is real?
Ideas | Environment
The Last Word with Diane Ackerman
Magnifying our mutant, turbulent, symmetrical natures.
Culture | Psychology
How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math
Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need.
Ideas | Literature
The Book No One Read
Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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Matter
How Nuclear Explosions Were Used to Save the Environment
In the late spring of 2010, the world watched, often in real time, a new kind of environmental disaster unfold: An oil rig operating deep under the seafloor of the Gulf of Mexico exploded,…
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Matter
What If the Universe Didn’t Start With the Big Bang?
Last week, researchers using the Planck spacecraft to study the skies announced that the polarization of light spotted by the BICEP2 experiment could be entirely explained by dust swirling…
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Matter
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since.It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and…
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Matter
Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down
Science giveth, and science taketh away. What appeared earlier this year to be a long-sought glimpse of ancient ripples in spacetime now seems to have been schmutz in astronomers’ eyes.…
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