She surveyed her former possessions, the stuff of a world now lost. "I'd be happy with just walking away from all of this," she concluded. "Dump it all and just start over. Happy birthday — I'm alive."
A commencement address to the graduates of Harvard Medical School on how their chosen profession is changing and what they’ll need to learn now that they’re out of school.
The story of a high school quarterback’s descent into madness, and its tragic end.
Doc moves quickly. He takes off his windbreaker, tosses his leather bag on the counter and unzips it. He pulls out a slate-blue polyester vest, V-necked, with six buttons. He raises his arms and jumps into it and then says, with an air of deep satisfaction, "Aah." Doc is proud of his bulletproof vest.
The discovery of 30,000-year old, perfectly preserved cave paintings in southern France offer a glimpse into a world that 21st-century humans can never hope to understand. The article that inspired Werner Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapists, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better.
Nearly every American soldier injured in Iraq or Afghanistan is treated—for a few days at least—at a single hospital in Landstuhl, Germany.
What overcrowded and swelling Bangladesh can tell us about how the planet’s population, more than 1/3 of which live within 62 miles of a shoreline, will react to rising sea levels.
Nicholas Volker is a little boy with a rare, devastating disease. In a desperate bid to save his life, Wisconsin doctors must decide: Is it time to push medicine’s frontier?
On a neuroscientist’s personal mission to solve the mystery of how the brain processes time.
How the tapping of Angola’s natural resources has kept the country a killing field, and made it one of the world’s most glaringly inefficient kleptocracies.
On BP’s actions after the oil spill.
In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, his goal was to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.”
The story of dog-scent lineup innovator Keith Pikett and the not-so-scientific science behind forensics.
On the battle over solar farms in the Mojave desert. An excerpt from Madrigal’s new book, Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology.
Energy problems are long problems that often receive short solutions. In 2000, when Mother Jones ran this history about what happened to the energy research boom of the late 70s and early 80s, I was buying $0.99 a gallon gas for my Escort. I chose this story because I think longform journalism can keep people interested in these issues that require decadal attention but are subject to year-to-year fluctuations in public interest. And it’s a great story.
Best Article Crime History Science
In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.
Sasha Shulgin, a former DOW chemist who now lives a quiet life as a pensioner outside the Bay Area, is responsible for the discovery of the majority of psychedelic compounds currently known.
Intended for cremation, 244 bodies are instead harvested for organs and tissue. The story of the families of the dead, the men who profited off the scheme, and the unwitting recipients of black market body parts.
Barry Michels is Hollywood’s most successful therapist cum motivation coach with an approach that combines Jungian psychology, encouraging patients to embrace their dark side, and “three-by-five index cards inscribed with Delphic pronouncements like THE HIERARCHY WILL NEVER BE CLEAR.”
The long, happy, surprising life of 77-year old Donald Gary Triplett, the first person ever diagnosed with autism.
A group of scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week in 1946. Those children are now 65 and the data generated through careful tracking of their life history has become extremely valuable.
The American medical establishment has gone to extraordinary lengths—some of which read like conspiracy theory—to discredit the notion (and its most visible promoter, Dr. Atkins) that carbohydrates, not fat, are the cause of obesity. It looks like they were wrong.
Twenty-five years later, inside the Exclusion Zone.
The search for the genetic distinction that allows certain animals, humans included, to be domesticated.
