Hurricane Harvey, which killed 60 people and may end up costing $150 billion, parked over Houston and dumped four feet of rain. The water overwhelmed the sprawling city’s flood control systems. Meteorologists and atmospheric scientists used up their superlatives describing the storm’s size and impact. They should have saved some. Hurricane Irma has become the…
In December 2015, a group of scientists carried tools into a chamber inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza. Usually, the room was sealed from the public. But with the blessing of Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities, they used laser tools to carefully align several bathroom-tile sized panels on the floor of the last intact Wonder…
In the ever-more masochistic world of wellness-boosting, pound-shedding diets, the latest trend involves putting your body into a controlled state of starvation known as “ketogenesis,” by cutting out nearly all carbs. If that doesn’t sound like your particular brand of torture, guess what? You’re already on it. Well, at least while you’re sleeping. Two independent…
It was a lovely September day in Yellowstone’s Boiling River, which was not, in fact, boiling. Tourists trundled through the shallow water and dipped in where it was deeper. A herd of elk even waded through unconcerned. And among it all, a team of researchers in waders sampled the water for a brain-eating amoeba that…
In August Google employee James Damore made the news and even Wikipedia by publishing his speculation that female software engineers are underrepresented due to inherent biological differences. Although he admitted that implicit bias and explicit bias may exist, Damore wrote, “I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ…
Recall your favorite memory: the big game you won; the moment you first saw your child's face; the day you realized you had fallen in love. It's not a single memory, though, is it? Reconstructing it, you remember the smells, the colors, the funny thing some other person said, and the way it all made…
This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two years ago, Inside Climate News and Los Angeles Times investigations found that while Exxon Mobil internally acknowledged that climate change is man-made and serious, it publicly manufactured doubt about the science. Exxon has been trying unsuccessfully to smother this slow-burning PR crisis ever…
Back in May, when Jennifer Hettema first saw the Trump administration’s proposed budget, it took her a while to find the bad news. But buried in a Health and Human Services appendix, there it was: a $100 million line through the nation’s teen pregnancy prevention program. A psychologist and public health researcher at the University…
Officially, the online search giant Google’s mission is to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” According to two new reports—one from The Wall Street Journal and one from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Campaign for Accountability’s Google Transparency Project, the company doesn’t just organize. When Google wishes it had information that’d maybe…
The microbes living on Earth are so plentiful as to be innumerable. Untold. Countless. Not in the hyperbolic sense, but the literal, gobsmacking sense. "It's estimated there are 100 million times as many bacteria as there are stars in the universe," says microbiologist Rob Knight, director of UC San Diego's Center for Microbiome Innovation. "And…