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146 illustrations
In the early 1990s, Rich Mullins wrote one of the most recognizable worship songs in modern Christianity — *Awesome God*. It was sung in megachurches...
In 2002, scientists Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and H. Robert Horvitz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering something remarkable inside every...
Every atom of iron in your blood, every molecule of calcium in your bones, was forged inside a dying star. In 1957, astrophysicists Margaret Burbidge,...
In 2004, researcher Arturo Zychlinsky at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin discovered something remarkable about how our bodies fight infection. When neutrophils — the...
In 2011, a security researcher named Dan Kaminsky discovered a catastrophic flaw in the Domain Name System — the internet's address book. Exploiting it could...
In the early 1990s, Rich Mullins was one of the biggest names in Christian music. His song *Awesome God* had become an anthem sung in...
In 2003, Linus Torvalds faced a crisis. The licensing tool his team used to manage Linux — the operating system running on billions of devices...
In the early 1500s, the German painter Matthias Grunewald completed a massive altarpiece for the monastery hospital at Isenheim, in what is now eastern France....
If you have ever put on a pair of Bose QuietComfort headphones, you know the almost eerie moment when the outside world goes quiet. The...
In the forests of British Columbia, ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered something that changed how we understand the natural world. Beneath the forest floor, ancient trees...
In Charles Dickens's *A Tale of Two Cities*, Sydney Carton is a man who has wasted his life. Brilliant but dissolute, he drifts through his...
In a small monastery hospital in Isenheim, France, the sick and dying were carried past a painting that would change how they understood suffering. Matthias...
Every day inside your body, somewhere between fifty and seventy billion cells quietly die. Not because something has gone wrong — but because everything is...
Every programmer knows the terror of a corrupted database. In 2017, engineers at GitLab — one of the world's largest code-hosting platforms — accidentally deleted...
In a bone marrow transplant, the donor's sacrifice begins deep in the hip bone. Physicians insert a needle through skin, muscle, and cortical bone to...
In Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean faces a moment that tears the soul in two. He has built a new life. He is Mayor...
Carl Sagan was fond of saying, "We are made of star stuff" — and he was not being poetic. He was being precise. Every carbon...
In the early sixteenth century, the German painter Matthias Grünewald was commissioned to create an altarpiece for the Monastery of St. Anthony in Isenheim, a...
In 1987, astronomers witnessed something extraordinary — a supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the first visible to the naked eye in nearly four centuries....
In 1997, forest ecologist Suzanne Simard discovered something remarkable beneath the floor of British Columbia's old-growth forests. Massive trees — what she came to call...
In 2007, researchers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute discovered a deep-sea octopus clinging to a rocky ledge, half a mile beneath the Pacific...
Every atom of iron in your blood was forged inside a dying star. In 1957, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle and his colleagues Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge,...
Every programmer knows the feeling. You have spent weeks building a feature — hundreds of lines of elegant code, clever solutions you are genuinely proud...
Every atom of calcium in your bones, every molecule of oxygen in your lungs, was forged inside a dying star. This is one of astrophysics'...