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194 illustrations
On October 31, 2003, thirteen-year-old Bethany Hamilton was lying on her surfboard off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii, when a fourteen-foot tiger shark seized her...
In Margery Williams' children's classic *The Velveteen Rabbit*, a stuffed toy asks the wise old Skin Horse what it means to become Real. The Horse...
Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old when a doctor's mistake left her permanently blind. She might have spent her life defined by...
When Apple introduced Face ID with the iPhone X in 2017, they built something remarkable into the front-facing camera: an infrared dot projector that maps...
In 2015, neuroscientist Emily Finn and her team at Yale made a remarkable discovery. Using brain scans from the Human Connectome Project, they found that...
In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published his landmark study on fingerprints, confirming what no one had dared to believe: no two human beings in history...
In 1924, Eric Liddell arrived at the Paris Olympics as Britain's most celebrated sprinter — the clear favorite for gold in the 100 meters. But...
In 2003, scientists completed the Human Genome Project — a thirteen-year effort to map every letter of human DNA. What they discovered astonished them. Your...
In 2006, Japanese scientist Shinya Yamanaka made a discovery that would earn him the Nobel Prize. He found that an ordinary adult skin cell —...
Behind your breastbone sits a small organ called the thymus gland. It is where your T-cells — the soldiers of your immune system — go...
In the world of bone marrow transplantation, something remarkable happens that most people never hear about. After a successful transplant, the recipient's blood type can...
In Margery Williams' beloved children's book *The Velveteen Rabbit*, a stuffed rabbit asks the wisest toy in the nursery what it means to become Real....
Fanny Crosby lost her sight at six weeks old when a man posing as a doctor applied a mustard poultice to her inflamed eyes. The...
Every iPhone ships with a unique identifier burned into its hardware at the factory — Apple calls it the UDID, the Unique Device Identifier. You...
After a bone marrow transplant, something remarkable happens. The recipient's blood cells gradually die off, replaced entirely by cells produced from the donor's marrow. Within...
In 1957, astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge and her colleagues published a groundbreaking paper demonstrating that nearly every element heavier than hydrogen was forged inside the furnaces...
There is a moment during metamorphosis that should unsettle anyone who thinks too hard about it. Inside the chrysalis, a caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings....
In 1892, Sir Francis Galton published his landmark study confirming what scientists had begun to suspect: no two human fingerprints are alike. But here is...
Open the Shazam app in a crowded restaurant — silverware clanking, a dozen conversations colliding, laughter erupting from the bar — and hold your phone...
In 1984, geneticist Sir Alec Jeffreys at the University of Leicester stumbled onto something extraordinary. While studying DNA sequences, he noticed patterns of repeated code...
In 2008, biologist Martha Weiss and her team at Georgetown University made a remarkable discovery. They trained tobacco hornworm caterpillars to avoid a particular odor,...
Every photograph you post online can be copied, cropped, filtered, and reposted until no one remembers where it came from. That is why companies like...
In the 1890s, Sir Francis Galton conducted one of the most exhaustive studies of human fingerprints ever attempted. After analyzing thousands of prints, he calculated...
Inside a chrysalis, something astonishing happens. The caterpillar doesn't simply sprout wings — it dissolves. Its body breaks down into a near-formless cellular soup. Only...