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The Mind of a Con Man

Diederik Stapel, a Dutch social psychologist, perpetrated an audacious academic fraud by making up studies that told the world what it wanted to hear about human nature. One summer night in 2011, a
PUBLISHED: April 26, 2013
LENGTH: 3 minutes (771 words)

The Big One?

We are at a mysterious fork in the road. One path leads to years, perhaps decades, of spread of a new type of influenza, occasionally making people sick and killing about 18 percent of them. It's not…
PUBLISHED: April 24, 2013
LENGTH: 3 minutes (760 words)
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Replacement Parts

For Joseph Vacanti, the quest to build new organs began after watching the death of yet another child. In 1983, the young surgeon was put in charge of a liver transplantation program at Boston…
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3169 words)

Can We Save the World by Remixing Life?

In 2011, a team of undergraduate students from Imperial College London devised a fresh way of halting the spread of deserts: Make bacteria that will persuade plants to grow more roots.…
AUTHOR:Ed Yong
PUBLISHED: April 11, 2013
LENGTH: 7 minutes (1921 words)

Plastic Soul: One man's quest to build an AI that can create games

We're the tech support guys. In a narrow, oddly-shaped building deep within the Imperial College campus in South Kensington, a PhD student named Michael Cook sits working beneath a large picture…
PUBLISHED: April 2, 2013
LENGTH: 26 minutes (6669 words)

See No Evil: The Case of Alfred Anaya

Alfred Anaya was a genius at installing secret compartments in cars. If they were used to smuggle drugs without his knowledge, he figured that wasn’t his problem. He was wrong. Illustration:…
PUBLISHED: March 19, 2013
LENGTH: 24 minutes (6091 words)

Top 5 Longreads of the Week

1. The Informant Kevin Charles Redmon | Washingtonian | March 8, 2013 | 28 minutes (7,039 words) [Not single-page] A man helps his friends during a killing spree in Southeast Washington D.C., leaving…

A Brief History of Applause, the 'Big Data' of the Ancient World

Once, people measured their leaders -- and themselves -- one clap at a time. The Dionysus Theater in Greece, from a German encyclopedia, 1891 (Wikimedia Commons) And then, suddenly, just when the…
PUBLISHED: March 15, 2013
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3149 words)

“We Gained Hope.” The Story of Lilly Grossman’s Genome

One – The Twitch It started with a slight twitch. Steve and Gay Grossman both noticed it in their daughter Lilly in 1998, when she was just one-and-a-half years old. By the time she was four,…
AUTHOR:Ed Yong
PUBLISHED: March 11, 2013
LENGTH: 12 minutes (3130 words)
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