Longreads

Aboard a cargo ship steaming from Los Angeles to Honolulu, his radars spinning 70 feet above a dark sea, Ernie Lewis filled another latex balloon with a whoosh of helium and let it fly. The balloon…

CTIO. Courtesy of Tim Abbott and NOAO/AURA/NSF From the Chilean seaside town of La Serena, it’s a journey of 80 kilometers to the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), through the…

Every American can be his own policeman; the country has nearly as many guns as it has people. Photograph by Christopher Griffith.

Nature | News The best of our longer reads as selected by our editors. 19 December 2011 The 24/7 lab and a medical researcher-turned-saboteur are amongst the editors’ pick of our longer reads…

In the past, a weak stomach and poor digestion was recognised as one of the diseases of philosophers, scholars and the learned. There was a finite quantity of vital spirits in the body: if they were called on to power digestion, they would not be available for the demands of deep thinking, and, conversely, philosophising interfered with the stomach’s duties. In the late 15th century, Ficino wrote that ‘it is bad to strain the stomach with food and drink, and worst of all, with the stomach so strained, to think difficult thoughts,’ and early in the 18th century the author of a treatise on occupational diseases noted that ‘all the men of learning used to complain of a weakness in the stomach.’

Three hundred miles up the Mississippi River from its mouth—many parishes above New Orleans and well north of Baton Rouge—a navigation lock in the Mississippi’s right bank allows ships to drop out of the river.