Henry Heimlich saved untold choking victimes when he invented his maneuver in 1974. Since then, he’s searched in vain for another miracle treatment—pushing ethical boundaries along the way. Now at the end of his career, Heimlich has hired an investigator to find an anonymous critic working full-time to destroy his legacy.
On Timothy Treadwell, who lived and died with the bears of Alaska.
The author investigates the massive wildlife die-off in the Salton Sea by rafting from its tributaries in Mexico.
“The crisis in Flint isn’t over. It’s everywhere.”
How a burst blood vessel transformed the mind of a deliberate, controlled chiropractor into that of an utterly unfiltered, massively prolific artist.
A suburban teen attempts to build a reactor, radioactivity ensues.
On the night sky’s understated importance in biological functions below.
A week on the campaign trail in the coffin-shaped Immortality Bus with Zoltan Istvan, the presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.
Will artificial intelligence bring utopia or destruction?
A story of science, weirdness, and alternate realities.
On the enduring appeal, both amateur and academic, of man vs. dinosaur.
Siblings tend to lions at a Tanzanian animal clinic.
"Eleven years her senior, Derek left America when she was fourteen to study and work in New Zealand, Greenland, and Chad, combing lakes for pale bacterial blooms. Over a decade Diana had collected his letters, filled with descriptions of the origins of rivers, dead fish in the Niantic, elephant calves strung up in abattoirs. And when she finished her sophomore year, he founded the Keren Reserve, a lion research conservatory that commanded a half-million acres at the edge of the Sahel. He had filmed four documentaries for television. Now, he researched emerging atavistic traits in the prides: infighting, cubs abandoned by their mothers."
A scientific and psychological examination of a gunshot.
"This is how you feel a bullet. You have certain sensory receptors that detect pain, these are called nociceptors. When a nocicpetor receives a painful stimulus, it sends a signal through its neuron to the spinal cord, which sends the signal to your brain, which sends it to a number of different areas for processing. The location and intensity of the stimulus is deciphered by the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, for example."
Uncertainty principles applied to modern domestic life.
"But there were always more things to add to the list—don't speak of body issues in front of daughters or read magazines with tweaked and smoothed images that were—hadn't she read this—actually altering the brain chemistry for young girls. Plus the magazines were paper, wasteful, though reading on line wasn't great for macular degeneration and other ocular issues and who wanted one more thing—glasses—to have to remember to pack every day? Plus glasses might make her feel older which wasn't terrible—she's happy where she is and needs to lean in lean back push onward and show this—but glasses might make her feel sexless and that would make her less present in the moment."
Inside the minds of two people, one with the world’s best memory and one with the world’s worst.
An astronaut, a superhero, a love story.
"Sometimes she feels like her marriage to a superhero was preordained; what other options did she have when her passion was split between flight and the stars? When she gets home, she’ll wrap her arms around his neck, twist her legs around his, lie down on his back and they’ll go carving through the night sky, ignoring gravity’s plaintive calls to come back down, the lights of industrial Houston like the stars reflected ten fold, the opaque water of the Gulf spotted with the miniature cities of oil rigs."
On drinking alcohol while pregnant.
On starting a rural retreat for recovering addicts.
A species of jellyfish that can transform itself back to a polyp at any time appears to debunk the most fundamental law of the natural world — you are born, and then you die.
The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker was extinct. Then it wasn’t. The story of an uncertain resurrection.
In 1943, a young research scientist found a cure for TB. It should have been the proudest moment of Albert Schatz’s life, but ever since he has watched, helpless, as his mentor got all the credit.
How a woman who couldn’t stop sleeping woke up.
A profile of Sir Dr. NakaMats, who claims to have invented over 3,000 things, including the floppy disk and karaoke machine.
On the history of Nigerian penis theft.
Animal nature, human racism, and the future of zoos.
