And so a few more dominoes fall. Michigan voted to legalize the recreational use of cannabis, while Utah and Missouri legalized it for medical use, according to projections made late Tuesday night. (A recreational measure in North Dakota failed, though […]
Every winter, millions of Americans descend on farms and lots across the country with the express purpose of inspecting, and ultimately choosing from, their local selection of coniferous evergreen trees. I'm talking, of course, about Christmas tree shopping—the widely practiced […]
Depending on your perspective, 2018 either brought us closer to salvation by way of robots, or closer to doom by way of robots: Where some see the end of meaningless work, others see the end of humanity, also meaningless. (We’re […]
This story was originally published by The Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The number of heat waves affecting the planet’s oceans has increased sharply, scientists have revealed, killing swathes of sea life like […]
Writing about climate change is an exercise in managed insanity. The human mind isn’t equipped to parse a crisis—the greatest in the history of our species—of such complexity and urgency and darkness. With record-breaking superstorms ravaging coastlines at a regular […]
When the cells inside your body lay down new tracks of DNA, they work hard not to deviate from the original blueprint—too many mistakes could lead to cancer or other diseases. Biologists synthesizing DNA in a lab are no different, […]
1. The five traditional senses keep us alert and alive: Hot pans burn, loud noises startle. Within our bodies, a sixth sense, known as interoception, perceives the state of—and threats to—our internal organs. From pangs and cramps to shortness of […]
The President of the United States says he does not believe that Hurricane Maria and its aftermath killed 2,975 people—an estimate generated by researchers at George Washington University and accepted as the rough official death toll by the government of […]