I'm the chief digital writer for the Columbia Journalism Review
The Dallas-based biotechnology company Colossal Biosciences has a vision: “To see the Woolly Mammoth thunder upon the tundra once again.” Founders George Church and Ben Lamm have already racked up an impressive list of high-profile funders and investors, including Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Paris Hilton, Winklevoss Capital — and,
On September 7, 1674, Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek sent a letter to London’s Royal Society detailing an astonishing discovery. While he was examining algae from a nearby lake through his homemade microscope, a creature “with green and very glittering little scales,” which he estimated to be a thousand times smaller
The members of Longevity House are united by two things, this Toronto Life magazine feature says: a willingness to hand over $100,000 and a burning desire to live forever. At a recent gathering, "they sipped brain-boosting beverages laced with lion’s mane mushrooms and garnished with grapefruit,
Ben Pearson writes about how movie dialogue seems to be more and more difficult to understand every day. "It's gotten to the point where I find myself occasionally not being able to parse entire lines of dialogue when I see a movie in a theater, and when
A golf cart-sized spacecraft will intentionally smash into a tiny asteroid at about 14,000 miles per hour on September 26. It's humanity's first test of our ability to deflect dangerous incoming space rocks. NASA currently knows the location and orbit of roughly 28,000
Lots of TV shows have special guest stars – usually celebrities of some kind – but Star Trek: Voyager is unusual in that one of its shows featured an actual prince, the man who later became King Abdullah II of Jordan. Abdullah's cameo was arranged as a surprise for him
For years, scientists have been focused on trying to come up with new treatments for Alzheimer's by preventing the formation of brain-damaging clumps of a mysterious protein called beta-amyloid. But is that really the key to the disease? In July 2022, Science magazine reported that a
Billions of years ago, an asteroid smashed into a dwarf planet in a cataclysmic collision that blasted the insides of the planet into outer space. Over time, remnants of the dwarf planet’s mantle have fortuitously fallen to Earth as diamond-rich meteorites, called ureilites, that reveal an unprecedented glimpse
According to a recent Bloomberg piece, in the US, roughly 40% of today’s high school students were overweight by the time they started high school. Globally, the incidence of obesity has tripled since the 1970s, with fully one billion people expected to be obese by 2030. An emerging view
Both sides of the sleep-training debate come with their own experts; whatever you decide to do, you’re going to be able to find a person with some type of credential to back you up. Parents who find the “cry in crib” approach abhorrent can cite the work of
A half century after founding the outdoor apparel maker Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, the eccentric rock climber who became a reluctant billionaire with his unconventional spin on capitalism, has given the company away. Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have
“Under the conditions we have identified, our conclusion is much stronger than that of any previous publication—an existential catastrophe is not just possible, but likely,” Google artificial intelligence researcher Michael Cohen said on Twitter in a thread about his paper. "In a world with finite resources, there'