For a young Madi Zhasekenov, summertime on the shoreline of the Aral Sea was an idyllic affair. His three-month school holidays were spent at the port near his home in Aralsk, south-western Kazakhstan, interacting with fishermen hauling in their daily catch. “We used to fashion fishing lures from…

The skyline of Manhattan at sunset in New York, May 23, 2018. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images This Sunday, the entire New York Times Magazine will be composed of just one article on a single subject: the failure to confront the global climate crisis in the 1980s, a time when the science was…

Carl Zimmer: ‘Heredity is central to our existence… but it’s not what we think it is.’Photograph: Mistina Hanscom/Lotta Studio Carl Zimmer is a rarity among professional science writers in being influential among the scientists on whose work he writes and comments – to the extent that he has been…

Sarah Jeong/SF Station Conservatives are up in arms over the New York Times’s latest hire: a tech writer named Sarah Jeong whom they allege to be racist against white people. Jeong, who currently works at the Vox Media site The Verge, was hired by the Times editorial board to work on technology…

With 1 in 17 people affected by rare disease you would think everyone would be interested to learn about the huge impact it has on individuals, their families and communities and yet sadly this is not the case. In the years since photographer Ceridwen Hughes's son was diagnosed, she has met hundreds…

The living landscape all around us is just a thin veneer atop the vast, little-understood bulk of the Earth’s interior. A widespread misconception about the deep subsurface is that this realm consists of a continuous mass of uniform compressed solid rock. Few are aware that this mass of rock is…

Karim Kadim / AP In 2016, I got my genome sequenced while I was working on a book about heredity. Some scientists kindly pointed out some of the interesting features of my genetic landscape. And then they showed me how to navigate the data on my own. Ever since, I’ve been a genomic wayfarer.…

1. Homecoming On a humid morning in June 2017, in a suburb outside Cincinnati, Fred and Cindy Warmbier waited in agony. They had not spoken to their son Otto for a year and a half, since he had been arrested during a budget tour of North Korea. One of their last glimpses of him had been from a…

E arly one summer morning, as rain is misting the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a middle-aged man is courting a crane. Chris Crowe, 42, bends forward in a slight bow and then flaps his arms slowly, like wings. “Hey, girl, whatcha think,” he coos. Walnut has heard that line before. The…

MERCED, Calif. — As he walks to class at the University of California, Merced, Freddie Virgen sees a sea of faces in various shades of brown. He is as likely to hear banda corridos blaring out of his classmates’ earphones as hip-hop. With affectionate embraces, he greets fellow members of Hermanos…

New research has shown that your memory is like a Wikipedia entry - you can get in there and edit it whenever you want, but so can other people. by Posted July 13th, 2018 Rise and Shine. The World is Doomed. The Nib, delivered to your inbox every AM. The Political Future is Female by Stats Posted…

A scientific consortium led by Dr. Eleanor Scerri, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford and researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, has found that human ancestors were scattered across Africa, and largely kept apart by a combination of…

H ackers obtained the Social Security numbers of more than 145 million Americans. Paid political chaos monkeys allegedly harvested data from at least 87 million Facebook profiles in an effort to influence the 2016 U.S. election, the Brexit vote, and possibly more. In a practice that could easily…

All but one of the 239 people on the doomed Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 had probably been unconscious - incapacitated by the sudden depressurization of the Boeing 777 - and had no way of knowing that they were on an hours-long, meandering path to their deaths. Along that path, a panel of aviation…

Home About This Volume Subscribe Past Volumes Stockists Films E-Newsletter Welcome to the Smith Blog // Adventure History Science D.I.Y. Photography Design Arts Life Facebook Instagram Twitter Vimeo Home » Design View the embedded image gallery online at:…

The conceit of naturalization is that it makes an immigrant not only equal to natural-born citizens but indistinguishable from them. Photograph by David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty Last week, it emerged that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (U.S.C.I.S.) had formed a task force in…

Credit: Christian Gertenbach Unsplash The concept of mindfulness involves focusing on your present situation and state of mind. This can mean awareness of your surroundings, emotions and breathing—or, more simply, enjoying each bite of a really good sandwich. Research in recent decades has linked…

Evolution has a greatest hits list. For whatever reason – where chance meets the winnowing force of natural selection – certain forms have evolved over and over again, creating curious trends through the tree of life. Giant, flightless birds seem to be a particular favorite. Big birds have evolved…

Pathological consumption has become so normalised that we scarcely notice it. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 11th December 2012 There’s nothing they need, nothing they don’t own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly button brush; a…

It’s a good time to be interested in the brain. Neuroscientists can now turn neurons on or off with just a flash of light, allowing them to manipulate the behavior of animals with exceptional precision. They can turn brains transparent and seed them with glowing molecules to divine their structure.…

“I think he’s important,” says the producer of a new podcast probing why Richard Simmons has retreated so dramatically from friends and the public. (Washington Post illustration; Jason Kempin/Getty; iStock) LOS ANGELES — Richard Simmons is gone. His fitness studio in Beverly Hills is shuttered. On…

“I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s totally lying.’ At the same time, I remember something in my mind saying, ‘And that doesn’t matter.’” For Daniel Shaw, believing the words of the guru he had spent years devoted to wasn’t blind faith exactly. It was something he chose. “I remember…

Planet Earth II ’s iguana hero. We begin with a close-up of a marine iguana hatchling, followed by a close-up of the nearly blind snake that’s trying to eat it. The iguana freezes as the snake slithers right behind it. The music swells and … the iguana is off! This is just the start of what might be…

For the first time, scientists have detected a giant neuron wrapped around the entire circumference of a mouse's brain, and it's so densely connected across both hemispheres, it could finally explain the origins of consciousness. Using a new imaging technique, the team detected the giant neuron…

For Andy Molholt, there’s something oddly special about hitting play on his boombox at the beach. The Philadelphia-based musician tours frequently with his band Laser Background and, between that and the many shows he helps book back home in Philly, he winds up seeing a lot of bands perform in bars,…

The genetic mutations leading to gynandromorphy — the possession of male and female sexual characteristics by a single individual — occur throughout nature, appearing in crustaceans, birds and other animals. It is especially noticeable in butterflies (such as this birdwing, Trogonoptera trojana),…

Legitimate protest albums spring from dire political climates. They're an expression of fear, but also a rallying cry. Sixties folk strummed acoustic pleas to, you know, like, get it together, man, while Seventies punk manifested that unity in collective anarchy. With that in mind, Jonathan Meiburg,…

Minnow-like Atlantic killifish spend their entire lives swimming in a toxic stew of chemicals in some of the United States’ most polluted waters. Now scientists have figured out why they are not just surviving, but thriving. In four severely polluted East Coast estuaries, these little striped fish…

The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur, including bones, soft tissue, and even feathers, has been found preserved in amber, according to a report published today in the journal Current Biology . While individual dinosaur-era feathers have been found in amber, and evidence for feathered dinosaurs…

Put the Serbo-Croatian word spomenik into Google Images, and you'll find dozens of photos of large, seemingly abstract sculptures, of architectural scale, placed in fields, on mountains, and in woods. These are photographs – each of them numbered, thusly – “Spomenik #1”, “Spomenik #2”, and so forth,…

I wrote a few tweets about Cuba which have caused some anger, not least from certain revolutionary leftists in Spain (one of whom has called me a “spokesman for Soros’ bitch mother” — interesting). So I wanted to bore everyone to death a bit more by writing about my thoughts at length. The Cuban…

A sculptor's rendering of the hominid Australopithecus afarensis . Credit: DAVE EINSEL Getty Images “This is outrageous!” Red-faced and visibly agitated, the 60-something was darting toward a hyperrealistic silicone reconstruction of Lucy, the world-famous, 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus…

Photo: pilesasmiles/Getty Images I am turning 30 in March, and so I was a little unnerved when I recently came across a question that researchers who study personality have apparently been trying to answer for more than a century: How much can a person really change after 30? “ You’re doomed! What…

Photo: Daniel Grizelj/Getty Images Mindfulness sounds pretty great. Who could be against teaching people to be more present in the moment, to try to worry less about the past and future? But in the Sunday New York Times , Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is…

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed Almost half of the adults in 12 European countries now hold anti-immigrant, nationalist views, according to major new research that reveals the spread of fringe political views into the mainstream. BuzzFeed News has been given exclusive access to new data from YouGov, which…

Ines Vuckovic-Dose How the iconic game became a portal to hell. There are currently 1,256 used Ouija boards for sale on eBay. Most of them likely got their start in dark basements and at middle school sleepovers, where children accused each other of moving the planchette as it slid over the cryptic…

I was an artsy kid. I took art classes in high school; that was my main thing. I loved art, but I was also kind of brainy. When I went to college, I decided I was going to be a doctor. I was in pre-med for one year at Miami University of Ohio. I hated it. I wasn’t bad at it, but I hated it. The next…

I’m not trying to have the same perspective as an American person from inside America. Because I’m not that. It’s OK to have somebody who has a perspective from the outside. It was really interesting to say something and have everyone sort of turn on me and go, “Oh my god, you’re the grossest human…

Despite the fact that their being millennials makes them lazy, whiny, entitled, and resistant to settling down, these two happy kids have invested in home-ownership together. Photo: iStock / Getty Images People really like to lump all millennials — a huge, diverse group of millions of people — into…

If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the…