“As vaccines roll out, the U.S. will face a choice about what to learn and what to forget.”
science
Longreads Best of 2020: Science and Nature
Our top picks in science and nature stories for 2020.
The Dark Side of Birding
“Undeniably, eBird … brings birders together and allows for rapid information sharing. It’s also created new—and sometimes contentious—etiquette and social dynamics.”
The Alarmist: Is One of the Pandemic’s Loudest Scientific Voices Helping or Hurting Public Health?
Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, the town crier of the COVID-19 pandemic.
A Fond Farewell to a Friend: the Arecibo Telescope
“Exploring the cosmos is a way for us to know ourselves. Each time we look up, in some way we are making contact with each other, with our past, present, and future.”
The Digital Security Threat Inside Jameson Rich’s Body
“It’s a feeling instead of living as a guinea pig for an opaque set of private interests, and a feeling that I can’t trust an industry that would ever put unsecure devices inside patients in the first place.”
The Strange and Twisted Tale of Hydroxychloroquine
“What happened with hydroxychloroquine was a debacle, but retelling the story might help avert the same kind of chaos next time around.”
An Atlas of the Cosmos
We’ve mapped Mars, the Moon, the solar system, even our own galaxy. Which means there is only one thing left to understand in this symbolic way and that is the entirety of the cosmos.
“The Final Five Percent” Wins 2020 Science in Society Journalism Award
Congratulations to Tim Requarth, whose Longreads essay has won the 2020 award in the Longform Narratives category.
The Weird Space That Lies Outside Our Solar System
Launched in the 1970s, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — the first two spacecraft and human-made objects to leave our solar system — have reached interstellar space and now beam back images from this mysterious region.
