On the history, science, and rise of ACL tears.

On the criminalization of nondisclosure.

On recreational genetics, privacy and the new vulnerability of family secrets.

On Ambien and the search for the next blockbuster insomnia drug.

A Bosnian social psychologist who studies guilt and responsibility in the collective memory (and denial) of Sreberbica, which is “among the most scientifically documented mass killings in history.”

A former teacher on what students lose when elementary schools skimp on science.

The fight to vaccinate children in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan as part of an attempt to eradicate polio worldwide.

Investigating an astrophysicist’s sudden death at an isolated resesarch base in Antarctica.

Due to global warming, this island nation may cease to exist in 20 years.

After 85 years, antibiotics are growing impotent. So what will medicine, agriculture and everyday life look like if we lose these drugs entirely?

How our memories become contaminated by inaccuracies.

On the mountain lions of Los Angeles.

A recent history of ‘bupe’ Suboxone film, which is described as a miracle cure for opiate addiction but flows freely from for-profit clinics to dealers and inmates, sometimes melted into the pages of smuggled Bibles.

An essay on those who don’t get caught by health care’s so-called safety net.

The scientific pursuit of the afterlife.

Fifty years ago, 180,000 whales vanished from the ocean. The mystery is not who killed them, but why.

The rise and fall of Intrade, the betting market for world events—elections, hurricanes, Academy Awards—and the death of its CEO near the top of Everest.

An unlikely environmentalist exposes the natural gas industry’s leaky infrastructure.

How the corpses of Hitler’s victims still haunt modern science—and American abortion politics.

Do dolphins and humans really share a special bond?

An interview with Cleve Backster, a former interrogation specialist with the CIA who used a polygraph machine in the 1960s to develop his theory of “primary perception,” which contends that plants have feelings.

Ending a pregnancy in the most “pro-life” state in America.

A profile of cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter, who has spent the last 30 years trying to replicate the human mind.

Each soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan generated around 10 pounds of garbage per day. Most of that trash—along with used equipment and medical supplies and other wastes of war—was burned in open-air pits, emitting a toxic smoke that many soliders blame for their poor health today.

What the popular game says about our subconscious.