Atlantic
From salt to hand sanitizer, corn is in everything. What would life without it look like?
When Christine Robinson was first diagnosed with a corn allergy 17 years ago, she remembers thinking, “No more popcorn, no ...
‘Men are struggling’: Psychologists get new guidelines for ‘traditional masculinity’
[T]he American Psychological Association, the country’s largest professional organization of psychologists, did something for men that it’s done for many ...
‘Affective presence’: It’s what helps others decide if you are likable
Some people can walk into a room and instantly put everyone at ease. Others seem to make teeth clench and ...
How AIDS transformed genetic engineering
For two decades, [Matt] Sharp had been living with HIV. He’d watched the height of the aids crisis claim dozens of his ...
‘Cute aggression’: Why our brains love puppies and kittens
I harass my dog [constantly]. She’s a little loaf of a thing, with big eyes and satellite-dish ears and a ...
Controversial treatment: Can we treat drug addiction with heroin?
As overdose deaths have broken records year after year in the U.S., a group of researchers has looked around the ...
Only half of psychology studies can be replicated. That’s a big problem
Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of ...
‘Anti-evolution drug’ could stop superbugs from mutating
Over the past 90 years, scientists have discovered hundreds of antibiotics—microbe-killing drugs that have brought many pernicious diseases to heel ...
DNA test for your dog? Here’s what your vet thinks about it
[T]he direct-to-dog-owner market has become bigger and more crowded: Embark, DNA My Dog, and Paw Print Genetics are just a few ...
Why our shrinking attention spans might be a good thing
Our supposedly shrinking attention spans are a hot topic these days—as you may have seen on TV or heard on a ...
‘Blinding speed’: How an ice age led to the populating of the Americas
Tens of thousands of years ago, two gigantic ice sheets smothered the northernmost parts of what has since been named ...
No, humans haven’t wiped out 60 percent of animals since 1970. But things still look ugly
Since [October 29], news networks and social media have been abuzz with the claim that, as The Guardian among others ...
Chasing the virus behind surging polio-like illness
[Fall 2014] Kevin Messacar, a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital Colorado, started seeing a wave of children with inexplicable paralysis. All of ...
When a DNA test uncovers an ugly family secret
As DNA-testing companies sell millions of kits, they’ve started to rearrange families. The tests have reunited long-lost cousins and helped adoptees find their ...
Merging soldiers and machines: Inside the quest to weaponize the brain
What lies beyond bionics? [DARPA director Justin] Sanchez described his work as trying to “understand the neural code,” which would ...
Personal DNA tests challenged for perpetuating ‘false notions’ of ethnic cultures and race
Genetic-ancestry tests are having a moment. Look no further than Spotify: [Last month], the music-streaming service—as in, the service used ...
Artificial Intelligence as Ken Kesey: A computer goes on a cross-country novel writing trip
On March 25, 2017, a black Cadillac with a white-domed surveillance camera attached to its trunk departed Brooklyn for New ...
Will lab-grown burgers succeed where ethical arguments against meat eating failed?
[O]ne-sixth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions are directly attributable to raising livestock, and the figure is rising as more ...
Can a DNA test prove you are black? This man is suing the government to find out
In 2014, Ralph Taylor applied to have his insurance company in Washington State certified as a “disadvantaged business enterprise.” The DBE ...
Do babies dream? If so, what do they dream about?
Technological advances are helping to shed more and more insight on, as the University of Washington professor of early-childhood learning ...
Living with hemophilia: When patients with genetic disorders don’t want to be cured
Jeff Johnson is 40 years old, and for all 40 of those years, he has been living with hemophilia. The ...
Quest to fight skin cancer with machine learning may have a diversity problem
As the rates of melanoma for all Americans continue a 30-year climb, dermatologists have begun exploring new technologies to try ...
Hardwired for delusion: How our brains deceive us
[Present bias] is the tendency people have, when considering a trade-off between two future moments, to more heavily weight the ...
When a DNA test says you aren’t exactly who you think you are
[Catherine] St Clair thought she was inquiring about a technical glitch. Her brother—the brother who along with three other siblings ...
How bacterial CRISPR defense systems are defeated by suicidal virus attacks
The natural world abounds with examples of predators that cooperate to take down their prey. And such teamwork also exists ...
‘War of words’ over what to call lab-grown meat exposes divide in America’s food culture
On [July 12th], in a small but packed auditorium, the FDA convened a public meeting about lab-grown meat—but you wouldn’t ...
Carl Zimmer’s new book walks us deep into the ‘thickets of genetics and genomics’
Our word for a diagram of the lines of descent—pedigree—is probably derived from the French pé de grue, or “crane’s foot,” ...
3 explanations for why we haven’t found aliens yet
[Enrico] Fermi wasn’t the first person to ask a variant of this question about alien intelligence. But he owns it ...
