In 1937, Harvard researchers began following the lives of 268 students. Year after year, the men were interviewed and given medical and psychological exams. The goal? Find a formula for happiness.

How moonlight drives life in the ocean.

A profile of philosopher Timothy Morton, who wants humanity to give up some of its core beliefs.

The activist who turned off the Keystone pipeline last fall is facing years in prison - and not backing down.

The life and work of a Manhattan psychoanalyst.

A hunt for maple poachers in Western Washington.

Among other things, crows can recognize human faces—and train each other to avoid people they don’t like.

For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.

”In West Antarctica, scientists have discovered the engine of catastrophe.”

Bangalore was once the icon of a globalized, high tech, utopian future. Now it’s a sign of global catastrophe.

What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.

“The gun debate would change in an instant if Americans witnessed the horrors that trauma surgeons confront everyday.”

An essay about what we’ll lose, and what we’ve already lost.

Imagine you felt like your skin was always on fire. Imagine you couldn’t even feel a bone break. The genetic link between those two extremes could hold the key to ending physical suffering.

A look back at the spill that launched a movement.

Horseshoe crab blood is an irreplaceable medical marvel. Which means it’s incredibly valuable. Which means biomedical companies are bleeding 500,000 crabs a year. Nobody knows quite what that means for the crabs.

Traditions, feuds, and controversies in British pest control.

South Florida is being overrun with cane toads, which can weigh almost six pounds. No one knows why they are swelling in numbers or when their population growth will slow.

For insect detectives, the trickiest cases involve the bugs that aren’t really there.

The inner lives of other species.

“It is a beautiful hand: strong, with long, slender fingers and smooth skin, its nails ridgeless and pink. If you didn’t know Jonathan Koch—if you first met him, say, on the courts at the Calabasas Tennis & Swim Club—you might not suspect that his hand previously belonged to someone else.”

He was the most powerful fish broker in New Bedford, America’s most valuable seafood port. The Russians who arrived looking to buy his operation were undercover agents and he told them everything.

On the underground doctors unleashing the healing powers of hallucinogens.

In Arctic Siberia, Russian scientists are trying to stave off catastrophic climate change—by resurrecting an Ice Age biome complete with lab-grown woolly mammoths.

The psychology behind our limitations of reason.