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216 illustrations
In the 1990s, during the siege of Sarajevo, a cellist named Vedran Smailovic did something the world never forgot. After a mortar shell killed twenty-two...
In 3D printing, nothing is built by accident. Before the printer ever heats its first filament, a detailed digital model — called a CAD file...
Every autumn, tens of millions of monarch butterflies lift off from meadows across North America and travel up to 3,000 miles to a cluster of...
In 2012, biochemist Jennifer Doudna and microbiologist Emmanuelle Charpentier described something remarkable hiding inside bacteria — a molecular system called CRISPR-Cas9. It works like a...
For over a century, the human appendix was the poster child for purposelessness. Medical textbooks called it vestigial — a leftover with no real function....
The James Webb Space Telescope carries eighteen hexagonal mirror segments, each one precisely ground from beryllium and coated in a whisper-thin layer of gold. No...
The James Webb Space Telescope took over twenty years and ten billion dollars to build. Its eighteen gold-coated mirror segments were each polished to a...
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope carries eighteen hexagonal mirror segments, and no two are shaped alike. Engineers at Ball Aerospace spent years grinding each one...
On September 30, 1972, Roberto Clemente lined a double off the wall at Three Rivers Stadium — his three-thousandth career hit. Only the eleventh man...
Every song ever recorded carries what engineers call an audio fingerprint — a constellation of sound frequencies as unique as a human thumbprint. When scientist...
On December 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente had every reason to celebrate. The Pittsburgh Pirates legend had just recorded his three thousandth hit that September —...
In 2012, Sir John Gurdon shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology for a discovery that reshaped our understanding of life itself. He demonstrated that every...
In the first days after conception, a human embryo contains stem cells that are entirely undifferentiated. They have no assigned role. Under a microscope, they...
For over a century, the appendix was medicine's most dismissed organ. Charles Darwin himself called it a useless vestige of evolution — a biological leftover...
When NASA launched the James Webb Space Telescope in December 2021, engineers faced an extraordinary challenge. The telescope had to travel nearly a million miles...
NASA's James Webb Space Telescope took twenty-five years to build. Twenty-five years of setbacks, redesigns, and moments when the entire project nearly died on a...
In 1962, British biologist John Gurdon made a discovery that would eventually earn him the Nobel Prize. He demonstrated that every cell in a frog's...
In 1892, German surgeon Julius Wolff published a remarkable discovery: living bone continuously reshapes itself in response to the loads placed upon it. Place consistent...
Three minutes before Eagle touched down on the lunar surface in July 1969, alarms started blaring inside the spacecraft. The Apollo 11 guidance computer was...
When NASA engineers built the James Webb Space Telescope, they didn't use a single massive mirror. Instead, they crafted eighteen individual hexagonal segments, each one...
In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 on a mission made possible by a rare planetary alignment that occurs only once every 175 years. Scientists had...
Look at your hands for a moment. Spread your fingers wide. In the earliest weeks of your development in the womb, those fingers didn't exist...
On December 31, 1972, Roberto Clemente boarded a cargo plane in San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Pittsburgh Pirates legend had just finished one of baseball's...
In 1464, the Cathedral of Florence commissioned a towering block of Carrara marble to be carved into a figure of David. The sculptor Agostino di...