Jos Benschop is climbing a ladder to get to the top of his newest machine. It’s a bit of a schlep. The contraption is the size of a double-decker bus—more than 150 tons of gleaming precision-milled aluminum covered in thousands of snaking tubes, colored cables, and pressurized tanks. From the ground, it looks like a…
It’s cold, it’s very, very noisy, and—if I can be quite honest with you—I’m not feeling super relaxed. I’m currently around 300 meters, or 1,000 feet, beneath the North Sea, in a dark, dank cave. It smells weird. And I am increasingly aware of the pressure from millions of tons of seawater just above my…
Underneath an Apennine massif, below the Jinping Mountains of Sichuan, and at the bottom of a South Dakota mine, there is a cosmic hunt afoot. Isolated deep beneath these rocky shields, massive detectors filled with liquid xenon aim to make the first direct detections of dark matter, the long-sought invisible substance whose gravity has sculpted…
Jim Franke pulls away the cover page of a presentation on the wraparound desk in his office, revealing an illustration of an odd-looking aircraft with massive wings stretching out from a stubby fuselage. The uncrewed plane is soaring thousands of meters higher than commercial jets fly—so high you can see the curvature of the Earth.…
At the end of a tense and scoreless first half of a soccer match between the English men’s team and rival Germany, millions of Brits let out a collective sigh and did what they so often do in moments of stress: They made tea. That wave of electric kettles clicking on, however, caused a different…
Testosterone. Methenolone. Nandrolone. Human growth hormone and EPO. Meldonium, modafinil, and mixed amphetamine salts. Clomiphene, anastrozole, levothyroxine, and liothyronine. Patches and capsules, creams and pills. A whole galaxy of steroids, metabolic modulators, and synthetic hormones coursing through the blood of a few dozen swimmers, sprinters, and weightlifters. And millions of dollars up for grabs for…
If you want to capture something wolflike, it’s best to embark before dawn. So on a morning this January, with the eastern horizon still pink-hued, I drove with two young scientists into a blanket of fog. Forty miles to the west, the industrial sprawl of Houston spawned a golden glow. Tanner Broussard’s old Toyota Tacoma…
When the covid-19 pandemic started, Jennifer Phillips thought about the songs of the sparrows. They were easier to hear, because the world had suddenly become quieter. Car traffic plummeted as people sheltered at home and shifted to remote work. Air travel collapsed. Cities—normally filled with the honking, screeching, engine-gunning riot of transportation—became as silent as…
For four days in February 2019, some 30 synthetic biologists and ethicists hunkered down at a conference center in Northern Virginia to brainstorm high-risk, cutting-edge, irresistibly exciting ideas that the National Science Foundation should fund. By the end of the meeting, they’d landed on a compelling contender: making “mirror” bacteria. Should they come to be,…
You’ve probably heard some version of this idea before: that many of us have an “inner Neanderthal.” That is to say, around 45,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens first arrived in Europe, they met members of a cousin species—the broad-browed, heavier-set Neanderthals—and, well, one thing led to another, which is why some people now carry…