Inside the slimy underground hunt for humanity’s antibiotic saviour
Superbugs that are resistant to antibiotics are one of the major global health concerns today. This piece looks at scientists’ efforts to develop new antibiotics to combat them.
In Defectors From the North, Doctors in South Korea Find Hope and Data
A piece examining a project driven by hope – an in-depth study of the health of North Korean defectors that seeks to understand the long-term impact of living through the regime’s many hardships, with the goal of rendering a future reunification more straightforward.
Analysis of “The Uninhabitable Earth”
Climate Feedback is a platform created by scientists to highlight inaccuracy in media coverage of climate change (often that put forward by climate change skeptics) – they invited 17 scientists to comment on the article in their analysis piece. New York Magazine has felt sufficiently stung by the response to republish their piece complete with annotations and sources (this is the version we share here).
The Uninhabitable Earth
Published this month, The Uninhabitable Earth is apparently the most read article in New York Magazine’s history. The piece proposes that the impact of climate change will be felt far sooner and far more severely that people realise. The piece is of interest in its own right, but has also provoked a strong response in the scientific community, including many climate change scientists who believe it overstates the case in an unhelpful manner.
Welcome to the Center of the Universe
A look at the work of the Deep Space Network, the nerve center for all communications between Earth and its “its robotic emissaries in deep space – anything from the moon and beyond”.
Where global warming gets real: inside Nasa’s mission to the north pole
The story of Nasa’s evocatively named Operation IceBridge.
The Uncounted
The risk posed by drug resistant infections is grave, but incidences are not being recorded properly – this investigative piece seeks to uncover the reality of the situation.
A Physicist Who Models ISIS and the Alt-Right
An interview with a scientist using adaptive modelling techniques to predict extremist activity.
The Deepest Dig
The ocean bed is little understood and mapped by humans, and has been referred to as “the next best thing to another planet” from an astrobiological point of view. We don’t really know it at all, and yet we have figured out how to mine it.
The race against heat
The challenge of keeping people cool in an age of increasing temperatures risks making us ever more reliant on resource intensive air conditioning that may also be perversely making places hotter for anyone that doesn’t have them.