Marine Planet
June 2021, off Herring Cove Beach, Provincetown. Michael Packard is a commercial lobster diver, and he's about 45 feet down doing what he has done for decades — working the bottom by hand, collecting lobsters, breathing off a hookah rig from the boat. Then the light goes out. Not
Last Tribes
Some Communities Have Never Needed a Grocery Store There are places where the forest isn't scenery, isn't wilderness, and isn't a thing you visit. It's where the food is. It's also where the medicine is, where the building material is,
Marine Planet
It Has No Shell, No Teeth and No Way to Run Look at a sea cucumber on the seafloor and you're looking at something that should have been eaten out of existence a long time ago. It's a soft, warty tube. It has no shell, no
Space
The Burj Khalifa stands 2,717 feet. Just over half a mile. It took about six years, 110,000 tonnes of concrete and an enormous amount of engineering effort to stop it from swaying its occupants into nausea. Put the same structure on the Moon and almost every problem that
Marine Planet
A fish reportedly changed hands in China in 2009 for around $300,000. Not a rare coral. Not a shark. An aquarium fish roughly two feet long, of a species you could photograph in a tank without anyone thinking twice. It's the Asian arowana — the dragon fish — and
GeoGeek
Yellowstone covers about 3,471 square miles. Roughly 96% of it is in Wyoming. Around 3% spills into Montana, and about 1% — a strip of roughly 50 square miles — sits inside Idaho. That Idaho strip has lodgepole pine, rivers, a waterfall, grizzly bears and elk. It has no roads worth
Marine Planet
Start with the number that makes everything else make sense. A blue whale weighs up to 150 tonnes. A krill weighs about one gram. The whale is roughly 150 million times heavier than the thing it eats. Scaled to a human being, that's a 70-kilo adult surviving
Then vs Now
Ohio, 1974. Walk into almost any kitchen in the state and you'd find the same seven things. Not similar things — the same things, in roughly the same places, in millions of houses. Six of them are effectively extinct. One is almost certainly within twenty feet of you right
Then vs Now
Your name. Your street address. Your phone number. Printed, bound, and delivered free to every household in your city. Also stacked in phone booths, hotel lobbies, libraries and gas stations, where any stranger could open it and find exactly where you slept. Nobody asked your permission. There was no opt-
Do it now. Don't think about it — just fold your fingers together the way you would if you were waiting for bad news. Look down. One thumb is sitting on top of the other. Around 55% of people find their left thumb there. Most of the rest find
A company of Texas Rangers under Lawrence Sullivan Ross rides down on a Comanche camp on the Pease River. It's over quickly. Among the people taken is a woman with a baby girl on her hip. She is dressed as a Comanche woman, she speaks Comanche, and she
A woman in Fort Myers goes out to the lanai at seven in the morning and there is an eight-foot alligator in the swimming pool. This is not a rare news story. It's a recurring one. Pools, golf course fairways, storm drains, garages, the drive-through lane
You flip open a catalog. Page 3,270-something. There's a picture of a house — porch, dormers, a bay window — and beside it a price. You fill in the order form. You mail it. Weeks later the stationmaster calls, because two boxcars are sitting on the siding with
Walk out of a dark cinema into afternoon sun. If you're one of about a quarter of people, you'll sneeze — two or three times, quickly, before your eyes have even adjusted. If you're the other three-quarters, you have no idea what anyone is
You're standing on a beach in Indiana on a July afternoon. The water is flat. There's no salt, no tide, no fin cutting the surface. Kids are in up to their knees. It reads as completely safe, and that reading is the problem. More than 1,
Walk east out of Rome along the Via Praenestina and you'll pass it without meaning to. It sits marooned in the middle of a traffic junction at Porta Maggiore, wedged between two aqueduct arches, and most people photograph the aqueducts instead. It's a tomb. It'
Why Nobody Mentioned the Marathon Run for 500 Years He comes down the road from the coast in the late summer of 490 BC, still in armour, still bleeding, and the city empties out to meet him. He gets one word out. Nikē. Victory. Then he falls, and he doesn&
Picture the ocean losing its oxygen and you probably imagine emptiness. Clear, still, lifeless water. That's not what happens. What happens is that the water gets taken over — and it changes colour. The handover Oxygen isn't just what fish breathe. It's what determines which
Step outside. Within five to ten minutes, the exposed skin turns red and wheals rise. Then itching, then burning. Expose enough of your body and it stops being a skin problem. There is a documented risk of anaphylaxis if the whole body is exposed — the same systemic collapse as a
Ask most people which animal takes over if humans vanish and they'll say chimpanzees. Same hands, same tools, same brain layout. An Oxford professor thinks that's exactly wrong — and his reasoning is better than the headline suggests. The apes go down with us Tim Coulson, a
The headline went everywhere: human DNA detected in a 2-billion-year-old meteorite. It is not true. No DNA, let alone human DNA, was detected in a meteorite — what was actually found were simple compounds that scientists have known are common in meteorites for decades. Fact-checkers flagged the
