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238 illustrations
In a bone marrow transplant, the process begins with destruction. Doctors administer chemotherapy so intense that it obliterates the patient's own marrow — the very...
In 1967, Johnny Cash crawled into Nickajack Cave on the Tennessee River, intending never to come out. Years of amphetamine addiction had cost him nearly...
In 2015, three scientists shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering something remarkable happening inside every living cell. Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich, and Aziz...
In Japan, there is an ancient art form called *kintsugi* — the practice of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. When a...
In 1965, Johnny Cash was destroying himself. Addicted to amphetamines and barbiturates, he had been arrested seven times, wrecked every car he owned, and nearly...
In 1967, Johnny Cash crawled into Nickajack Cave outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, fully intending to die. Years of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction had hollowed him out....
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, a convict named Jean Valjean stumbles to the door of Bishop Myriel after nineteen years in prison. No inn would...
In 1967, Johnny Cash crawled into Nickajack Cave outside Chattanooga, Tennessee, intending to die. Years of amphetamine and barbiturate addiction had cost him nearly everything...
In 2015, chemist Tomas Lindahl received the Nobel Prize for a discovery that stunned the scientific community: your body's DNA is constantly breaking down —...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean stumbles out of nineteen years in prison hardened and bitter. No inn will take him. No door opens....
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's *Crime and Punishment*, there is a scene that has haunted readers for over a century. Raskolnikov — a young man crushed beneath...
In 1892, German anatomist Julius Wolff documented a principle that orthopedic surgeons still rely on today: when a bone fractures and heals properly, the body...
Robert Robinson was a troublemaker. After his father died in the 1740s, young Robinson ran wild through the streets of London, drinking and brawling his...
In 2015, Aziz Sancar shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping one of the most remarkable processes in the human body: nucleotide excision repair....
Every software developer knows the cold sweat of pushing a bad change to production — code that seemed right but broke everything. In October 2021,...
In the summer of 1741, George Frideric Handel was a ruined man. Once the toast of London, the composer now faced crushing debt. A devastating...
In 2003, after the Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart during reentry, debris scattered across East Texas. Among the wreckage, NASA recovered a hard drive from...
In C.S. Lewis's *The Voyage of the Dawn Treader*, the boy Eustace Scrubb is selfish, greedy, and thoroughly unpleasant. One night on a dragon's island,...
In September 2001, recovery teams pulled dozens of computer hard drives from the wreckage of the World Trade Center. They were crushed, waterlogged, scorched beyond...
On May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted with the force of five hundred atomic bombs, flattening 230 square miles of ancient forest. Old-growth trees...
Every second, the DNA inside a single human cell sustains somewhere between ten thousand and one hundred thousand molecular injuries — lesions caused by sunlight,...
In 1949, a microbiologist named Albert Kelner stumbled onto something remarkable. Working at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, he discovered that bacteria whose DNA had been...
In 2015, Turkish-American chemist Aziz Sancar received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping one of the most extraordinary processes in the human body —...
In 2006, Dr. Shinya Yamanaka at Kyoto University made a discovery that stunned the scientific world. He found that ordinary adult skin cells — cells...