But with sea levels rising along the East Coast—a natural phenomenon accelerated by climate change—scientists project that in our lifetimes what was once considered a hundred-year flood will happen ev...
The choices we make, or fail to make, about which tasks we hand off to machines shape our lives and the place we make for ourselves in the world.
Other mysteries have been untangled. Redheads are known to feel pain especially acutely. This confused researchers until someone realized that the same genetic mutation that causes red hair also incre...
Nicotine had been isolated and synthesized in the nineteenth century. In pure form, it took an ounce at most to kill the average adult.
In 1847 three English children fell seriously ill after eating birthday cake decorated with arsenic-tinted green leaves.
From almost every standpoint ethyl alcohol must be regarded as the most important poison with which medical men and jurists have to deal, Gettler wrote in a paper, listing a seemingly endless record o...
Every inappropriate prescription and insufficient dose given in medicine would kill weak bacteria but let the strong survive.
A labor-saving device doesn’t just provide a substitute for some isolated component of a job or other activity. It alters the character of the entire task, including the roles, attitudes, and skills o...
A growing body of scientific research links antibiotic use in animals to the emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria: in the animals’ own guts, in the manure that farmers use on crops or store on t...
Shared pain is central to what it means to be a human being, but we are a society that values the anesthetic over pain. We hide our prisons, our sick, our mad, and our poor; we expend colossal resourc...
Automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it.
We think of kindness as an emotional quality, but it’s also an act of imagination, of extending yourself beyond yourself, of feeling what you do not feel innately by invoking it.
The name explains the structure: carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen bond into a ring-shaped structure called a cresol (also found in creosote), and phosphorus hangs on to the ring like an exhausted swimmer...
Massachusetts is seeing a surge in the number of unvaccinated children. Last year nearly 1,200 kids entered kindergarten with religious or philosophical vaccine exemptions, roughly double the total ab...
In his examination of the young dial painters, he’d discovered a fact that was impossible to dismiss. The women were exhaling radon gas.
In Washington, D.C., where the Volstead Act—which provided for enforcement of the Eighteenth Amendment—had been militantly approved, the police reported nearly a ten-fold increase in drunk driving arr...
I can’t say that exhaustive research and reporting will guarantee a great story, but I’ve never been able to pull one off without it.
Harry was so exasperated by his frog experiments that one day he began venting to anyone who would listen. He even told his undergraduate class that he had spent countless hours just to prove that fro...
Automation turns us from actors into observers. Instead of manipulating the yoke, we watch the screen. That shift may make our lives easier, but it can also inhibit the development of expertise.
Why would we have evolved this way? The most probable answer is that an organism that responds quickly to fast-changing social environments will more likely survive them. That organism won’t have to w...