1 We Are Smothering the Planet with Our PoopThe next time you go grocery shopping, look at where your food comes from. Most of it isn’t local. Strawberries come from California or…

I’m standing on an observation platform atop 24 colossal pressure cookers that belong to DC Water, the sewage treatment plant of our country’s capital. You may think that a sewage…

One day in 2010, when oncologist Paul Muizelaar operated on a patient with glioblastoma—a brain tumor infamous for its deathly toll—he did something shocking. First, he cut the…

At first, no one looked twice at the new variant. Detected in South Africa in January 2021, the novel coronavirus lineage, called C.1, appeared similar to other variants. It wasn’t…

Take a walk on a busy avenue and you hear either traffic whizzing by or creeping in a honk-laden crawl. Add the hissing of pneumatic bus brakes, distant sirens, the boom-boom of overloud…

The idea of cryogenically freezing a person to preserve their body until many years into the future has long been a staple of science-fiction stories. However, the need to reliably…

Blaise Pascal was a renowned French polymath of the 17th century, scientist, philosopher, mathematician, inventor, and later in life a theologian. Among his many contributions was…

There’s a silent epidemic slowly brewing around the globe. It hasn’t claimed as many lives as COVID-19, but if it gets out of control, it will likely prove even deadlier. It’s…

Part of Dennis Plenker’s daily job is growing cancer. And a variety of different ones, too.Depending on the day and the project, different tumors may burgeon in the petri dishes…

Robert Burioni is a virologist at the San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, and a serious scientist. But in 2016, something happened that changed his course. He was on television…