Technology
How Manhattan Got Its Street Grid [Excerpt]
To accommodate a fast-growing New York City, John Randel, Jr., began to lay out the city’s streets in 1808—an impressive endeavor that holds lessons for today’s information infrastructure...
Stories by Marguerite Holloway
The Sciences
Finding the Good in the Bad: A Profile of Rita Levi-Montalcini
The Italian researcher faced prejudice and adversity as a woman and as a Jew, but went on to elucidate a growth factor essential to the survival of nerve cells
The Sciences
Bigfoot Anatomy
Sasquatch is just a legend, right? According to the evidence, maybe not, argues Jeffrey Meldrum--a position he holds despite ostracism from his fellow anthropologists and university colleagues...
The Sciences
What Visions in the Dark of Light
Lene Vestergaard Hau made headlines by slowing light to below highway speed. Now the ringmaster of light can stop it, extinguish it and revive it—and thereby give quantum information a new look...
Health
Graft and Host, Together Forever
Thomas E. Starzl pioneered organ transplantation with antirejection drugs--an approach he hopes to end through a phenomenon called microchimerism
The Sciences
What Makes a Revolution?
Ingredients for environmental awakening
The Sciences
The Beauty of Branes
Lisa Randall's thinking on higher dimensions, warped space and membranes catalyzed ideas in cosmology and physics. It might even unify all four forces of nature
Environment
When Extinct Isn't
Questioning the term after a bird's return
Health
When Medicine Meets Literature
Writing and humanities studies produce better physicians, Rita Charon argues, because doctors learn to coax hidden information from patients' complaints
The Sciences
Hiking Underground
The longest cave in the world wends below Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park. Here visitors can view cave formation up close
The Sciences
Superhot among the Ultracool
With atoms near absolute zero, Deborah S. Jin created a Fermi condensate--opening a new realm in physics that might lead to room-temperature superconductivity
Space & Physics
Stars atop a Silent Volcano
The largest astronomical observatory in the world sits on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The views, up or down, are spectacular
Evolution
Passport in Time
Volunteers join archaeological and historical Forest Service projects around the country, learning field techniques
Technology
Talking Bacteria
Microbes seem to talk, listen and collaborate with one another--fodder for the truly paranoid. Bonnie L. Bassler has been eavesdropping and translating
The Sciences
A Great Echelon of Birds
Half a million sandhill cranes stop along a stretch of Nebraska¿s Platte River every spring
Technology
The Mutable Brain
Score one for believers in the adage "Use it or lose it." Targeted mental and physical exercises seem to improve the brain in unexpected ways
The Sciences
Friable Flowers
Glass under glass: Harvard University's unusual botanical collection
The Sciences
Through a Glass Deeply
Walking beneath the waves at Monterey Bay Aquarium
The Sciences
Follies and Foucault's Pendulum
Seeing science past and present in two Parisian museums
The Sciences
Peering into the Earth
A rim with a view in Hawaii Volcanoes National Park
