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Every day, without your awareness or consent, somewhere between 50 and 70 billion of your own cells choose to die. Scientists call it *apoptosis* —...
In 1882, Russian biologist Élie Metchnikoff made a discovery that would earn him the Nobel Prize. Peering through his microscope at a starfish larva, he...
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...
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,...
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...
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 2002, scientists Sydney Brenner, John Sulston, and H. Robert Horvitz won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering something remarkable inside every...
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...
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...
Every day inside your body, somewhere between fifty and seventy billion cells quietly die. Not because something has gone wrong — but because everything is...
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 early 1500s, the German painter Matthias Grunewald completed a massive altarpiece for the monastery hospital at Isenheim, in what is now eastern France....
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 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 Victor Hugo's *Les Misérables*, Jean Valjean has rebuilt his life. Once a convict, he now lives under a new name as a respected mayor...
In 2014, researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute documented something extraordinary. Marine biologist Bruce Robison and his team observed a deep-sea octopus —...
In the early sixteenth century, the painter Matthias Grünewald completed a massive altarpiece for a monastery hospital in Isenheim, Alsace. The patients there suffered from...
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 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...
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 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 2004, researcher Arturo Zychlinsky at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin discovered something remarkable about how our bodies fight infection. When neutrophils — the...