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Why disease outbreaks on Chinese fur farms are a serious risk to public health
Reporting for this story was supported by the Pulitzer Center. A sharp, musky scent rushes over me as I step out of the taxi outside Mr. Wang’s house near Tong’erpu, in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. It’s one of the country’s largest fur-trading centers. Wang greets me, sporting a blue jersey and matching cap. “I’m about
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The case against the Zanclean megaflood refilling the Mediterranean
On October 6, 1970, the deep-sea drilling vessel Glomar Challenger returned to port in Lisbon, Portugal, bearing a cargo that would revise history. During its 54-day voyage, the Challenger had punched 28 holes into the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea. The recovered cores pointed toward a startling conclusion: About 6 million years ago, the sea
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Tales of a very clever slime mold
Sixteen years ago, a brainless, unicellular organism blew our human minds. And it continues to fascinate and surprise researchers to this day. Scientists had known that some slime molds of the species Physarum polycephalum consist of one giant, pulsating cell that keeps changing shape as it moves around and branches out to access food and
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Looking for an ADHD coach? Choose carefully
For most of her adult life, Katherine Sanders had what she calls a typical career for someone with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. After finishing her doctoral thesis on Bronze Age Syrian mythology, she bounced between unrelated jobs. She tutored university students. She sewed Victorian corsets for bridal outfits. She designed stained glass and sold picture
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The curious case of low-protein diets
Protein dominates the grocery shelves: Protein chips. Protein cookies. Protein water. It’s in the headlines, too: January’s new US dietary guidelines raised the recommended amount from 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram body weight to 1.2 to 1.6 grams. Yet there’s a cadre of scientists studying a contrary phenomenon: In critters from single-celled yeast to
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Why heterothermic animals control their body temperature
In 1774, British physician-scientist Charles Blagden received an unusual invitation from a fellow physician: to spend time in a small room that was hotter, he wrote, “than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.” Many people may have been appalled by this offer, but Blagden was delighted by the opportunity for self-experimentation. He
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The latest on the search for the mass of a neutrino
Imagine you are given three gumballs of different flavors. You are told that one of them is heavier than the others, and one is lighter. But which is which? Your task is made difficult by the fact that these gumballs weigh nearly nothing. And sometimes they swap flavors. Oh, and when you try to pick
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What is wisdom, and can it be taught?
Emily Swanson was under pressure — not the end-of-the-world variety, but definitely stressful: prepping for her PhD qualifying exams. She fully expected the process to be grueling. But then, like a character from a heroic tale, she had an encounter that changed her path. Swanson took a job as a teaching assistant with Monika Ardelt,
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Writer KC Cole on the beauty in nature and of humanity
When the world seems dark and scary, when compassion and tolerance seem in short supply, when hostility and hate make our future foreboding, hope comes from the place we might least expect it: science. As the Roman philosopher Lucretius observed during similarly fraught times, back in 55 BC: “This dread and darkness of the mind
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Mining the deep ocean | Knowable Magazine
More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70- ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile — sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by
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