Trying to remember 200 million species is a pretty daunting task. To help with this, scientists categorize living things into different groups. The kingdom of Animalia contains multiple phyla (singular: phylum), groups distinguished by key features in body plans and genetic relations to one another.…

From the 16th century to the 19th, scurvy killed around 2 million sailors, more than warfare, shipwrecks and syphilis combined. It was an ugly, smelly death, too, beginning with rattling teeth and ending with a body so rotted out from the inside that its victims could literally be startled to death…

Michael Pollan (left) and Samin Nosrat in Cooked , 2016 (Netflix) We’ve made it through January, which likely means your coworkers and Facebook friends are eager to share updates about their liver detox, celery-juice cleanse, or Whole 30 challenge. They might hasten to assure you these regimens…

M ark has one of the most coveted jobs in television. As a senior commissioner at one of Britain’s biggest broadcasters, he controls a budget extending to the millions. And every day, a steady stream of independent television producers arrive at his desk desperate to land a pitch. At just 39, Mark…

In the quest to fend off forgetfulness, some people build a palace of memory. It’s a method for memorizing invented in ancient times by (legend has it) the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos, more recently made popular by multiple best-selling books (and the “mind palace” of Benedict Cumberbatch’s…

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Produced in partnership with Epic Magazine . The author, center, at age 7. Photo: Courtesy of Patrick Burleigh This story was produced in partnership with Epic Magazine. I got my first pubic hair when I was 2 years old. I couldn’t talk, I could barely walk, but I started growing a bush. Or so they…

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…

The campus at the University of California, Merced, where about 53 percent of the undergraduates are Latino, closely mirroring the state’s demographics. Credit Max Whittaker for The New York Times MERCED, Calif. — As he walks to class at the University of California, Merced, Freddie Virgen sees a…

Home Store Membership Animation Newsletter Authors About firstlook.media © copyright First Look Media Terms of Service Privacy Policy Your Memory is Worse Than You Think 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…

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:…

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…

John Garrison “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…

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,…

Owen Jones Nov 29, 2016 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…

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…

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 you’ve got now — that’s it,” is…

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 Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks…