Journalist
Letter From Tamil Nadu
Ringing in the New Year by Wrestling Bulls

It was a blistering hot day in January and the dirt streets of Avaniapuram, a tiny village in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, were turned into a gladiator arena. Villagers dressed in [...]

The Eating of the Minds
A meal of sheep's brains at a Moroccan open-air kitchen reminds one traveler that when it comes to unusual foods, bizarreness is a matter of ... taste

Hayder Alijanaby eats brains with businesslike tidiness. He squeezes a piece of hemisphere into a wad of bread, then pushes it into his mouth. [...]

Phosphate: Morocco's White Gold
Phosphate is used in everything from fertilizer to rechargeable batteries. And Morocco's King Mohammed VI has cornered the market

In May 2009 a petite brunette from Paris wearing black heels scrambled up a pile of mine tailings on the outskirts of the Moroccan town of Khouribga. [...]

  Alaska's Billion Dollar Mountain
The story of one man who used a little persuasion—and a lot of luck—to win the rights to millions of tons of rare earths

The helicopter took off, the wooden city of Ketchikan slowly receded, and the mountainous rain forest approached. [...]

  Cargo Theft: The New Highway Robbery
Boosting trucks laden with pharmaceuticals is a low-tech, low-risk road to riches for organized criminals

Ricky Gene McNew pulled his plum-red big rig into a TravelCenters of America truck stop in Denmark, Tenn. McNew had been driving all afternoon, starting from Louisville, hauling $10 million in pharmaceuticals. [...]

  DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life
A grass-roots movement of biohackers is ready to dream up billion-dollar ideas

I first dabbled with genetic engineering two years ago in my apartment. [...]

Same Species, Polar Opposites: The Mystery of Identical Creatures Found in both Arctic and Antarctic Waters
How exactly did identical marine species come to inhabit both the north and south polar regions?

Two years ago, several research vessels shipped out to the North and the South poles to assemble a census of creatures living under the ice. [...]

  The Other Orchid Thief: Virus Ravages the Popular Flower
Once the province of high society, orchids have found their way into households worldwide, but so has a plant-killing batch of viruses.

For hobbyists like Colette Theriault, a photographer who lives in Ontario, orchids are an addiction. [...]

Industrial biotech to boom?

In the next 20 years industrial biotech will surge, according to a new analysis of The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). [...]

  Texas splurges on cancer

Texas doled out the first round of grants from a $3 billion publicly funded program to boost in-state cancer research. Almost all of the initial $61 million went to in-state academic institutions like University of Texas, Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine. [...]

A Hidden Cost of Farming

When Don Mavinic looks at cow manure he sees a puzzle in need of a solution. There's phosphorus locked in there, and the world is desperate for it. [...]

  Roadmap to the Future

More than half a century ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated a program to construct the nation’s Interstate highway system. The program changed the way Americans live. [...]

Counter Biology
DIYbio is a national organization founded in 2008 to use the tools of synthetic biology to expand experimentation and bioengineering into the realm of hobbyists. Daniel Grushkin of the NYC chapter elaborates on their belief that academic labs have limited ability to explore the potentials of scientific discoveries.

As we’ve organized, we’ve begun to build labs that unlike conventional spaces, are open to collaboration.. [...]

The Myth of the Clean Compressed-Air Car Continues
Manufacturing vehicles that run on compressed air is clean, cheap and easy—or so the thinking goes, for a handful of niche manufacturers. Can compressed air save bad air quality and choked streets?

It's an elegant idea—you ride your motorcycle to the filling station, pull up to the compressor where other people are filling their tires and top off your fuel tank with air. [...]

Synthetic Bio, Meet FBIo
You may soon be visited by an FBI agent, or a scientist acting on behalf of one. Here's why
.

They tried to fit in at this year’s iGEM synthetic biology competition. They really tried. Piers Millet from the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs sported a white hoodie with an iGEM insignia that was slightly too tight. [...]

  Tiny Tubers

When Ros Gleadow opened the airlock to the greenhouse at The Australian National University, she stepped into the atmosphere of the future. [...]

  Am I a Biohazard?

Brooklyn, New York, April 21, 19:00 hours: Molecular biologist Ellen Jorgensen and I spread a plastic tarp over my cherry table and parquet floor. Then, one by one, we set vials and pipettes down, preparing a lab in my living room. [...]

  Like Life

To get to know the Biomimicry Guild is to learn its biology-inspired lingo: Its members aren't a group—they're a "meme." They don't reject ideas—they have an "immune response [...]"

Archaeology Courting the Apocalypse

As if the sandwich-board prophets needed another excuse: December 12, 2012 marks the end of time, or at least the end of the calendar cycle, according to Maya astronomy [...]

  Footsteps of Our Ancestors

Entering the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History brought me face-to-face with a fuzzy replica of one of our earliest ancestors, Lucy, a member of the species Australopithecus afarensis who lived 3.3 million years ago. [...]

Sleep Therapy

In the 1995 Eco-Challenge, adventure racer Robyn Benincasa and her teammates decided to complete the seven-day, 300-mile course without wasting time on sleep. “That,” she now admits, “was a bad idea.”[...]

  The End of Malaria

For Gretchen Garman, 29, a volunteer in Malawi, the symptoms came on suddenly and violently. "I was exhausted but otherwise fine, and then all at once I was nauseous, vomiting, and had a103-degree temp [...]

  Malaria Update: The Borderland Bug

No place on the map measures up to the Thai-Cambodian border for breeding super strains of malaria. The forest region, a magnet for gem miners searching for pigeon blood rubies and Pailin blue sapphires, has already twice spawned resistance to our best drugs [...]

  Oceanographer: Sylvia Earle

In her 62 years studying the sea, the National Geographic Explorer in Residence has spent 6,500 hours exploring life underwater[...]

Greener than Oz
The design firm HOK and a major car parts manufacturer attempt to build an industrial city of 2 million from scratch, in India, based entirely on "nature’s principles."

It was an unlikely conference room, a barren hill 150 kilometers southeast of Mumbai. But that’s where the three partners met. [...]

Cameron Sinclair: Design Within Everyone's Reach
The founder of Architecture For Humanity tries to change the world by bringing thoughtful, inexpensive design to the world's neediest.

At 26-years-old, Cameron Sinclair was a self-acknowledged CAD monkey, grinding out blueprints for a New York architect. Ten years on, he’s now the design world’s big kid on the block. [...]

Waterless World
Himalayan ice is melting quickly. When it’s gone, Asia could be in serious trouble.

Without ice, the Zanskaris would be isolated into oblivion. The yak herders and barley farmers of this former Buddhist kingdom of about 10,000 souls depend on the Zanskar River in India’s high Himalayan mountains. [...]

Coasting Along

The word bhaiya is permanently ingrained in my head. "Brother," it's the first word we use when we stop the car to ask for directions. We start with the rickshaw drivers. They know best [...]

Israel's disaster team pays grisly price for kamikaze clean-ups

JERUSALEM, Feb 4 (AFP) - Every time a Palestinian suicide bomber blows himself and Israeli bystanders to pieces, throwing flesh and body parts across crowded streets, a small group of dedicated [...]

  Suspected woman kamikaze throws wrench in Israel's security profile

JERUSALEM, Jan 29 (AFP) - Israeli security experts who have spent years carefully compiling profiles of potential suicide bombers have been sent back to the drawing board after what is thought to be [...]

  Israeli Forces Attack Palestinian
Symbols of Power

JERUSALEM, Dec 4 (AFP) - Israeli forces on Tuesday launched attacks on key Palestinian symbols of autonomy, including Gaza International Airport, as the authorities announced they were stepping up [...]