Looking for a Greener Death By Michelle Weber Highlight Aquamation is more environmentally-friendly than cremation and has a growing number of supporters. So why is it mostly illegal?
You’re Putting My Brain Where, Exactly? By Michelle Weber Highlight When you donate your body to science, you don’t get a whole lot of say over what happens to your parts.
Lettuce Try to Grow Dwarf Tomatoes Next By Krista Stevens Highlight When we all eventually move to Mars, we’re going to need to know how to grow our own veggies. NASA’s working on the science of farming in space.
The Menace and the Promise of Autonomous Vehicles By Jacob Silverman Feature What does it mean to experiment with technology that we know will kill people, even if it could save lives?
The Myth of the Stanford Prison Experiment By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Despite its unscientific methods, the Stanford Prison Experiment continues to influence the way we understand human behavior.
Could South Africa’s Drought Help Deconstruct the Divisions of Apartheid? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Cape Town’s drought has turned the once green city brown, but can it help unite the rich and poor and black and white?
Life Under (Water) Pressure By Michelle Weber Highlight Welcome to the dangerous, cramped world of the saturation diver, and the extraordinary strangeness of working 500 feet under the sea.
Small-Town New Hampshire’s Battle with Bears and Liberty By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Grafton, New Hampshire has a bear problem, but how much of the problem is the result of human behavior?
What Is the Hot Commodity, Exactly? By Michelle Weber Highlight You say seaweed, I say fish, let’s call the whole harvest off. Welcome to the most interesting article on legal tensions around seaweed harvesting in Maine you’ll read all week, and maybe ever.
Farming a Warming Planet By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Even if rising sea levels flood many coastal cities, California farmers plan to grow food for a living. So what will the future California grow?
Death By Tchotchke By Michelle Weber Highlight Plastic is everywhere: bottles, toys, cars, and, increasingly, in oceans and rivers so clogged with plastic that you can walk on them.
Can the Jaguars’ Unique Biology Help It Survive On Our Over-Populated Planet? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight By avoiding confrontations with humans, and using water and edge-lands, jaguars might be ideally suited to surviving the modern world.
The Death and Birth of the Los Angeles River By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight The authors describe the river as a “postindustrial terra incognita,” a place “of discarded things and marginalized people”. Can the city change that?
Does Outdoor Recreation Correlate With Environmental Values? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Being an outdoorsy person doesn’t make you a conservationist, sadly.
Wild At Heart By Longreads Feature They perform daring escapes from slaughterhouses, zoos, and laboratories. But animals on the run are only as free as we want them to be.
Will Big Pharma Help Save Some of the Oldest Marine Life on Earth? By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight To save threatened shorebirds, one pharmaceutical biologist had to figure out how to save the crabs they depend on.
Great News Everyone, We’ll Never Have Shared Food Experiences Ever Again By Michelle Weber Highlight To every man and woman their own Dorito.
Why Beyoncé Placed HBCU’s at the Center of American Life By Danielle Jackson Commentary The singer’s latest performance helps expand the possibilities of what it looks like to be a black thinking person.
Little Sunfish: The Robot That Could By Krista Stevens Highlight How the best robot, “Little Sunfish,” helped Japanese scientists understand the scope of the damage at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Want Your Husband to Stay True? Kill a Hummingbird and Roll it in Oil and Honey By Krista Stevens Highlight People are capturing and killing hummingbirds for cockamamie love potions, and Mexico doesn’t seem to care.
Who Needs Jurassic Park When We Have Liaoning, China By Michelle Weber Highlight Liaoning’s wealth of fossils is helping paleontologists better understand dinosaurs’ relationship to birds — and making China a paleontology hot spot, for better or worse.
I Have a Half Mind to Donate My Brain to Science By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight Dara Bramson’s grandmother decided to donate her brain to science, so Bramson visited the donation center to learn how iot all works.
The Strike: Chemicals, Cancer, and the Fight for Health Care By Ian Frisch Feature Workers at Momentive Performance Materials had given their lives to the chemical plant. The strike was supposed to save what little they had left.
Chasing the Man Who Caught the Storm: An Interview With Brantley Hargrove By Jonny Auping Feature “If you’ve had the luck of actually seeing a tornado, man, that’s like nicotine. It gets under your skin.”
As Innocuous as Plant No. 1 By Aaron Gilbreath Feature William Vollman enters the radioactive red zone to visit the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
Where Have You Hidden the Cholera? By Longreads Feature In Mozambique and around the world — and throughout history — cholera outbreaks have caused riots. Why? And what does it have to do with bicycles?
Before We All Teach Someone a Lesson By Catherine Cusick Highlight Online harassment gets out of hand constantly. Can prosocial bots help turn the tide of anonymous interactions before people become abusive?
The Amateur Investigators of the American West By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight When 66-year-old Bill Ewasko got lost near Joshua Tree National Park, the case spawned a network of amateur investigators obsessed with finding him.
It’s Time for Real Talk About Aliens By Aaron Gilbreath Highlight No time in human history has presented clearer, more compelling evidence that something unexplained is interacting with human beings, be they aliens or UFOs.
The Way We Treat Our Pets Is More Paleolithic Than Medieval By Longreads Feature Hunter-gatherers tended to think of pets as part of the family, and so do we. But in other time periods, intimacy with animals has been more taboo.
