The story of a strange outbreak at a Catholic school in Mexico in 2006. Girls reported pain in their legs, nausea, and fever. When the cases spread to hundreds of pupils, the government sent a psychiatrist specialised in adolescents experiencing psychosomatic illnesses to investigate. The story is currently being turned into a film.
A story attempting to peel back the myth surrounding The Manson Family.
A look at individual actors undertaking ambitious geo-engineering projects to try to halt climate change. These activities are controversial, and currently appear to exist in a “near legal vaccum”.
A look back at the time when Amazon launched a transformative product, Prime. It’s a time that seems hard to imagine now, when Amazon was not an all-conquering behemoth and “there wasn’t a blind faith that every Jeff idea was going to be a home run”.
A detailed look at how Viktor Orbn and his Fidesz party quietly knocked out the foundations of democracy in Hungary and launched a new era of self-proclaimed “illiberal democracy”. http://bit.ly/vox-orban
This piece unpicks a recent scientific paper that offers a new slant on the Fermi paradox. The paradox addresses the apparent inconsistency in the vast scale of the universe and the lack of signs of life outside planet Earth. The new slant is in essence that we need to significantly adjust upwards the possibility that we are in fact alone and there is no paradox at all. The author quotes Carl Sagan in considering the implications of humanity’s solitude – “In all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life..the Earth is where we make our stand.”
A profile of Hillary Clinton looks at ‘the Gap’ – between the Hillary that colleagues, friends and rivals see up close, and Hillary the candidate. The profile is accompanied by an in depth interview.
A Stanford computer scientist offers an eloquent response to the internal memo written by a Google engineer that leaked last week.