South Florida and the danger of the rising sea.

On the unexpected longevity of a very strange theory.

In search of Ramanujan in India.

Uncovering the true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin.

On the slow death of a beached humpback whale.

Websites and apps are designed for compulsion, even addiction. So why aren’t they regulated like drugs or casinos?

Will artificial intelligence bring utopia or destruction?

Bomb makers—including ISIS—have been on a quest to obtain red mercury, a weapon reputed to be powerful enough to “create the city-flattening blast of a nuclear bomb.” They haven’t found it yet. That might be because it doesn’t exist.

It’s highly unlikely that a gigantic space rock will crash through our atmosphere and destroy civilization as we know it. But it’s not impossible either. Which is why a small but growing community of scientists and astronomers are scrambling to spot and destroy dangerous asteroids long before they hit us.

The story of a transplant from a 26-year-old bike mechanic to a 41-year-old fireman with severe burns.

How English became the weirdest major language in modern use.

“As the world’s best-known oceanographer—Sylvia is to our era what Jacques Cousteau was to an earlier one—she feels a heavy responsibility. In her lifetime, she has seen the ocean damaged in ways humans never thought it could be. The ongoing disaster leaves her mournful, desolate, and sometimes scary to talk to. Since her first dive, in a sponge-diver’s helmet in a Florida river when she was 16, she has spent 7,000 hours, or the better part of a year, underwater.”

As the birds decline, one Icelandic island keeps throwing a rowdy, boozy puffin festival.

When they go to bed tonight, white people will be five times likelier to get a good night’s sleep than African-Americans.

On the gender gap in diagnosis and treatment of autism.

She told the family of a severely disabled man that she could help him to communicate with the outside world. Then she said they were in love.

On the ground with a young Texas doctor who travels the state to provide abortions.

The real Henry David Thoreau.

America’s devastating treatment of schizophrenia.

The history of canis lupus in America, up to the present day.

The frustrated – and well-hidden – story of Isabel Myers Briggs, inventor of the famous personality test.

An oral history of the disaster:

Someone said to me, or maybe I read it, that the problem of Chernobyl presents itself first of all as a problem of self understanding. That seemed right. I keep waiting for someone intelligent to explain it to me.

The art and science (or lack thereof) of water dowsing.

Dolphins may have the capacity for mourning, and elephants sometimes bury their dead.

Dr. Joel Dreyer was a respected psychiatrist. Then he took a sudden turn to a life of drug dealing. Medicine might be able to explain why.