They began as strangers playing chess in Central Park. Frank was a scholar of South Asian textiles, known to friends as a guy who will lend a hand. Lincoln was homeless, living on a sidewalk on 59th Street. Paul was an older man living alone, in an apartment across the
Hamza Doost is 6-foot-3, with a chubby, bearded face, black hair, and an ankle monitor. For the past year, the 21-year-old has been confined to his father’s home in Hayward, an East Bay suburb. He’s allowed a computer, but the government tracks every keystroke.
Back in 1984, when Erin was 13, her life seemed perfect. Her father, John H. McCann III, was successful, charming, and funny. Erin and her younger sister, Meredith, who was ten, lived in a Tudor-style mansion in a wealthy suburb of Pittsburgh. There was a swimming pool in their
Loren Krytzer walked into the California auction room broke and unemployed. Seventy-seven seconds later, he walked out a millionaire — all thanks to a blanket. His life changed forever when he discovered that a forgotten old family heirloom, a Navajo blanket from the 1800s that had been sitting in his
Scientists are catching up to what parents and other caregivers have been reporting for many years: When some people with autism spectrum disorders experience an infection that sparks a fever, their autism-related symptoms seem to improve. With a pair of new grants from The Marcus Foundation, scientists at MIT
A Nepali climbing guide thought to have died on Mount Everest has been found crawling down to Base Camp, six days after he was last seen alive. Dawa Sherpa was last seen above Camp 3, at around 24,600ft, while coming down the mountain after summiting. Hopes for his survival
On December 7, 1877, Thomas Edison walked into the offices of Scientific American and placed a metal device on a desk. With a turn of a crank, Edison astonished the dozen or so staffers who had gathered around the contraption.The machine spoke. “Good morning,” it said in Edison’s
From TheForce.net: "Here's how that came about: My co-producer was Tony Bongiovi. Jon Bon Jovi was his little cousin and by little I mean we were all in our 30s and early 40s but Jon at that time was 17 years old. And we were
From Gareth Edwards at Every: "In September 1974, Ed Roberts was sitting at the bank in a foreclosure meeting. His once-profitable calculator company, Micro Instrument and Telemetry Systems, was on the verge of bankruptcy. But Roberts was soliciting a $65,000 loan. Not to spend on calculators, he
From Amitha Kalaichandran for Undark: "In May, I was invited to take part in a survey by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to better delineate how long Covid is described and diagnosed as part of The National Research Action Plan on Long Covid. The survey had
From Chris Lewicki: "Some mistakes feel worse than death. A February evening in 2003 started out routine at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. I gowned up in cleanroom garb and passed into the High Bay 1 airlock in Building 179 where nearly all of NASA’
Links that interest me, and maybe you
Romanian-born mathematician Stefan Mandel used simple probability and a massive ticket-buying operation to win lottery jackpots 14 times. Born into a poor Jewish family in Romania in 1931, Mandel developed a passion for mathematics at a young age but could not pursue an academic career because of financial
A Georgia man convicted of leading an $11 million fraud scheme while in custody through contraband phones is now on the run after officials say he escaped from a federal prison camp. The United States Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and other law enforcement agencies are searching for
A Kitchener, Ont., teen has won the best project award for innovation at the Canada-Wide Science Fair. Eigenpulse: Eliminating Demographic Bias in Pulse Oximetry and Remote PPG from First Principles was the name of the project by Gurnoor Kaur, a Grade 11 student at Cameron Height Collegiate Institute in
Berlin-based Italian photographer Paride Ambrogi recently combined two of his loves, photography and pasta, in a brilliant, possibly tasty way. Ambrogi made the Ravihole Camera, a working pinhole camera made entirely from fresh pasta dough. Ambrogi made the Ravihole as part of a workshop on fresh-filled pasta in
When Denis Alimov passed through the arrivals hall of El Dorado International Airport in Bogotá on the morning of February 24, 2026, he had the outward appearance of a middle-aged Russian tourist escaping Moscow's harsh winter: a salt-and-pepper goatee, a light travel bag, a connecting
In almost 40 years, Mako Nishimura never lost a fight. She told me this as if it were as obvious as night following day. Nishimura is 5ft-nothing and slight of build. She is also probably the only woman ever to have been a full-fledged yakuza, a member of
In 1963, a Turkish resident who simply wanted to expand his house ended up making an unexpected and monumental discovery. While knocking down a wall in his basement, he found a mysterious room—then another, and another. Without realizing it, he had uncovered the entrance to Derinkuyu: an underground city
There is one time of day when Dawn Faizey Webster can feel normal. It’s after dinner, once she has been changed into her pyjamas and she is lying in bed, watching television. After a certain amount of time or a certain number of episodes, Netflix, the ever-considerate streaming
Master Yan'an has trained at the Shaolin Temple in China since he was 6 years old. He has climbed the roughly 1,500 stone steps up Wuru Peak to the Bodhidharma Cave thousands of times. None of the steps is the same size or height. Some are narrow;
In 1925, Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time, his first collection of short stories, which included his first published boxing story, “The Battler.” On a cool Tuesday evening in October of 1955, three decades after the publication of “The Battler,” an adaptation of Hemingway’s boxing story aired on NBC.
The seventh of May 1931 was a hot, dusty day in Kentucky. Alongside a dirt road, a service station manager named Matt Stewart stood on a ladder painting a cement railroad wall. His application of a fresh coat of paint was gradually obscuring the sign that had been painted there.
The year was 1957. The Cold War was in full swing. The U.S. was seemingly lagging behind in the technological arms race and needed to make a show, a display of power and prowess. Project Plowshare was a project in which the nation’s scientists were supposed to find