Science | The Atlantic
Too Few Americans Are Eating a Remarkable Fruit
Zoe Schlanger
Someplace in the lush backroads of San Sebastian, in western Puerto Rico, my friend Carina pulled the car over. At a crest in the road stood a breadfruit tree, full of basketball-size, lime-green fruits, knobbled and prehistoric, like a dinosaur egg covered in ostrich leather. One had recently fallen. I jumped out to scoop it up, thinking about the breadfruit tostones we would make that afternoon. We'd fry chunks of the white, spongy flesh, then smash them with the back of a cast-iron pan, then f...
Daniel Kahneman Wanted You to Realize How Wrong You Are
Daniel Engber
I first met Daniel Kahneman about 25 years ago. I'd applied to graduate school in neuroscience at Princeton University, where he was on the faculty, and I was sitting in his office for an interview. Kahneman, who died today at the age of 90, must not have thought too highly of the occasion. "Conducting an interview is likely to diminish the accuracy of a selection procedure," he'd later note in his best-selling book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. That had been the first finding in his long career as a...
A Drug Half as Good as Ozempic for One-30th the Price
Daniel Engber
"In my lifetime, I never dreamed that we would be talking about medicines that are providing hope for people like me," Oprah Winfrey says at the top of her recent prime-time special on obesity. The program, called Shame, Blame and the Weight Loss Revolution, is very clear on which medicines she means. At one point, Oprah stares into the camera and carefully pronounces their brand names for the audience: "Ozempic and Wegovy," she says. "Mounjaro and Zepbound." The class of drugs to which these fou...
Most of This Island Disappeared in Just a Decade
Tommy Trenchard
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.Before the sea started taking house-size bites out of Nyangai, this small tropical island off the coast of Sierra Leone hummed with activity. I first visited in 2013 while documenting the construction of a school on a neighboring island. It was a cloudless day in April. A group of teenagers was busy setting up a sound system for a party. Old men chatted and smoked in the shade of palm trees. Children chased one another through the maze of sa...
America's Climate Boomtowns Are Waiting
Abrahm Lustgarten
As my airplane flew low over the flatlands of western Michigan on a dreary December afternoon, sunbursts splintered the soot-toned clouds and made mirrors out of the flooded fields below. There was plenty of rain in this part of the Rust Belt--sometimes too much. Past the endless acres, I could make out the eastern shore of Lake Michigan, then soon, in the other direction, the Detroit River, Lakes Huron and Erie, and southern Canada. In a world running short on fresh water in its lakes and rivers,...
Don't Miss This Eclipse
Marina Koren
Right now, a special cosmic arrangement is sliding into place. The moon has positioned itself on the same side of Earth as the sun. The moon has drawn closer to Earth, and its orbit is tilted just so. On April 8, our silvery satellite will pass between our star and our planet, and cast its shadow upon us. In the United States, the darkness will trace a ribbonlike path about 115 miles wide from Texas to Maine, temporarily extinguishing the daylight. Within that area, in cloud-free conditions, the ...
Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car
Zoe Schlanger
Sign up for The Decision, a newsletter featuring our 2024 election coverage.The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country's electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032.This would speed up the transformation of the...
A Glowing Petunia Could Radicalize Your View of Plants
Zoe Schlanger
The gallon pot of white petunias I held on an otherwise ordinary subway train, on an otherwise ordinary Thursday in March, would have looked to anyone else like an ordinary houseplant. But I knew better. An hour before, Karen Sarkisyan, one of the plant scientists responsible for this petunia's existence, had dropped it off at my office. He warned me that my petunia had spent a while in transit, and might not immediately put on a show. Still, I'd rushed the petunia into a windowless room. My eyes...
Extreme Heat Toasted the Caribbean's Corals
Lisa S. Gardiner
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. In the Caribbean, coral reefs sat in sweltering water for months--stewing in a dangerous marine heat wave that started earlier, lasted longer, and climbed to higher temperatures than ever recorded in some locations. In some places, the water was more than 32 degrees Celsius--as toasty as a hot tub. Ever since the water started to warm, researchers and conservationists ha...