When we were teenagers, my brother and I received kidney transplants six days apart. It wasn’t supposed to be that way. He, two years older, was scheduled to receive my dad’s kidney in April of 1998. Twenty-four hours before the surgery, the transplant team performed its final blood panel and discovered a tissue incompatibility that […]
Read MoreWhen you hunt the tree of heaven, you come to know it by its smell. A waft of creamy peanut butter leads you to a tall trunk, silvery and nubbled like cantaloupe rind, rising into a wide crown of papery pink seeds and slender leaves. To kill this tree, you cannot simply cut it down with […]
Read MoreIn March 2015, the Deepwater Champion rig was at work for Exxon Mobil, exploring for oil in the Atlantic Ocean 120 miles off the coast of Guyana, drilling below 6,000 feet of water and through 12,000 feet of earth. Ultra-deepwater drilling is so complex that experts liken it to space travel, and the dangers are […]
Read MoreOne day in 1992, near the northern pole of a planet hurtling around the Milky Way at roughly 500,000 miles per hour, Kelly Drew was busy examining some salmon brains in a lab. Her concentration was broken when Brian Barnes, a zoophysiology professor from down the hall at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, popped by […]
Read Morethe bottle held a thin broth, light brown, with some uncertain chunks of dark matter bobbing on top—a soup, maybe, but one that you’d never want to eat. Once it was poured into a white plastic tray, the chunks resolved into insects. Here were butterflies and moths, the delicate patterns of their wings dimmed after […]
Read Morehalioua began 2020 with $5.1 million in funding. By way of thanks she sent all of her investors, including Rosen, fluffy toy puppies wearing company bandanas. She secured an office on the edge of downtown San Francisco, but the lease began in March, the same month the Bay Area became the first part of the […]
Read More“It almost seems as if Van Leeuwenhoek knew that a new microworld was to unfold,” Cocquyt told me. One of his scientific rivals, Johannes Hudde, later said, “isn’t it surprising that we never had the creativity to use these ball lenses to observe little things against the daylight, and that an uneducated and ignorant man such […]
Read MoreSeptember 2000, Atlanta. I had just celebrated my 23rd birthday. After a summer spent cashiering at Whole Foods for $8.25 an hour, and with my senior year at Spelman College about to start, I was already stress-planning my schedule. For a moment, though, all that worry came to a pause. I stood in my cramped […]
Read MoreSophie Papp and her family had a ritual for the recently departed. Whenever a relative died, she and her brother and cousins would all squeeze into a car and drive to Koksilah River, an hour north of their homes in Victoria, British Columbia. There, they would spend the day swimming in the glassy jade water, […]
Read MoreMichigan State University has several labs dedicated to the study and control of lampreys, which make for idiosyncratic subjects. Lamprey skeletons are constructed of cartilage rather than bone, and they can regenerate fully functional spinal cords even after they’ve been sliced in half. They possess an incredible olfactory power, capable of detecting scents at extremely […]
Read MoreApplicants for EPA carbon-storage permits must persuade the agency that they can contain both the plume of injected carbon dioxide and a secondary plume of saltwater that the CO2 displaces from the rock—what drilling engineers call the pressure pulse. The EPA requires evidence that neither plume will contaminate drinking water while a project is operating […]
Read More“This is my life,” Wallach says. “There is nothing else I’d rather be doing. If I was given a billion dollars, today, the first thing I would do is build a superlab.” When Compass came calling, he finally got the golden opportunity to pursue that dream. Maybe not a full-blown, billion-dollar superlab. But a lab […]
Read MoreTo date, however, American utility companies haven’t widely deployed current-blocking devices to the live grid. “They’ve only done things, like moving to higher and higher operating voltages”—for cheaper transmission—“that greatly magnify their vulnerability to these storms,” Kappenman tells me. Tom Berger, former director of the US government’s Space Weather Prediction Center, also expressed doubts about […]
Read MoreThere was once an orangutan named Ken Allen at the San Diego Zoo who was notorious for carrying out complex escape plans. He found every nut and bolt in his cage and unscrewed them; in his open enclosure he threw rocks and feces at visitors. On one occasion, he constructed a ladder out of some […]
Read More“At that point I started texting everyone I’d come in contact with over the week,” he says. Realizing how many people visit Provincetown from across the country, he posted about being infected on Twitter and Instagram too. DMs flowed back, from people who thought they’d picked up some summer crud as they traveled. “They thought […]
Read More“Alter do Chão has a history of being a matriarchal village,” Neca explains. “If you did a survey here, you’d see that 70 percent of households are run by women.” Dona Lusia never married. “She never let herself be subjugated by a man,” her daughter says. “She raised us all on her own.” Dona Lusia […]
Read MoreShe decided to study physics. It was, in a way, good timing—a Black American woman had just become the first of her kind to earn a physics PhD, back in Greene-Johnson’s home state. At Stanford, Greene-Johnson was the only Black student in her major, but that didn’t surprise her. What did was the presence of […]
Read MoreWe no longer have a supply problem with vaccines. The only question left is, are you limited by demand or by logistics. In less vaccinated countries, there isn’t much demand. In Nigeria, Covid would be, like, the 15th-largest cause of death—you’ve got HIV, TB, malaria, diarrhea. So when you say to them, “Hey, number 15,” […]
Read MoreFor now, that’s the stuff of dreams. What’s real is that on one day in 2019, a patient tucked a bud into each ear, fell asleep, and proceeded to astound NextSense’s scientists—by churning out brain waves that showed exactly how this product could save a person’s life. Jonathan Berent is the CEO of NextSense. On […]
Read MoreHaugen says that he and other Kings River representatives tried to negotiate with the would-be attackers. They met around half a dozen times between late 2016 and early 2017. Haugen says they could’ve given a little–they had, after all, been selling that floodwater in deals like the one with Terranova for decades. But, he says, […]
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