13 premium articles in this collection
Commercial nuclear reactors all work pretty much the same way. Atoms of a radioactive material split, emitting neutrons. Those bump into other atoms, splitting them and causing them to emit more neutr...
Last spring, 3,000 British soldiers of the 4th Light Brigade, also known as the Black Rats, descended upon the damp forests of Estonia’s eastern territories. They had rushed in from Yorkshire by air, ...
Omar Yaghi was a quiet child, diligent, unlikely to roughhouse with his nine siblings. So when he was old enough, his parents tasked him with one of the family’s most vital chores: fetching water. Lik...
The microwave-size instrument at Lila Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, doesn’t look all that different from others that I’ve seen in state-of-the-art materials labs. Inside its vacuum chamber, th...
Depending who you ask, AI-powered coding is either giving software developers an unprecedented productivity boost or churning out masses of poorly designed code that saps their attention and sets soft...
Consider, if you will, the translucent blob in the eye of a microscope: a human blastocyst, the biological specimen that emerges just five days or so after a fateful encounter between egg and sperm. T...
It’s the 25th of June and I’m shivering in my lab-issued underwear in Fort Worth, Texas. Libby Cowgill, an anthropologist in a furry parka, has wheeled me and my cot into a metal-walled room set to 40...
Be honest: Have you ever looked up someone from your childhood on social media with the sole intention of seeing how they’ve aged? One of my colleagues, who shall remain nameless, certainly has....
Something is rotten in the city of Nunapitchuk. In recent years, a crack has formed in the middle of a house. Sewage has leached into the earth. Soil has eroded around buildings, leaving them perched ...
On a Friday evening last December, every tier of US law enforcement—federal, state, and local—was dispatched to the US Army Natick Soldier Systems Center, a military research installation outside Bost...
Oleh Kovalskyy thinks that Starlink terminals are built as if someone assembled them with their feet. Or perhaps with their hands behind their back. To demonstrate this last image, Kovalskyy—a l...
On a Sunday morning in a Midwestern megachurch, worshippers step through sliding glass doors into a bustling lobby—unaware they’ve just passed through a gauntlet of biometric surveillance. High-speed ...
