Stories

A couple of miles outside the town of Page, three 775-foot-tall caramel-colored smokestacks tower like sentries on the edge of northern Arizona’s sprawling red sandstone wilderness. At their base, the Navajo Generating Station, the West’s largest power-generating facility, thrums ceaselessly, like a beating heart. …

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense. …

Once dismissed as a curiosity, the placebo effect is now recognized as the key to the brain’s “inner pharmacy.” If only doctors knew how to open the medicine cabinet. …

Madhumita Venkataramanan reveals the lucrative trade in our so-called “anonymous” data.

An early warning system would save thousands of lives when the next major earthquake hits. But will California find the money to implement it?

Tom Yack steered his black SUV past the blue-and-electric-purple walls of the Skatin’ Station II and swung south toward the industrial buildings that line Ronda Drive. To the east, the 1.1 million-square-foot W. F. Whelan Co. warehouse that used to be a Kmart distribution center. Along the road, companies that make up much of Canton Township’s small manufacturing base: Champagne Grinding & Manufacturing Co. and Directional Regulated Systems, Inc. and a dozen others. …

At 17 minutes past midnight on Saturday 25 April, Rob Sanders’s computer started chiming with alerts. On his screen, squiggly recordings poured in from seismometers in Tibet, Afghanistan and nearby areas that were feeling the first vibrations from a tremendous earthquake. …

The noisy, first-day-of-school chatter subsides. A hush falls over 200 students in a lecture hall at the Medical College of Wisconsin. Already, their thoughts are drifting up a flight of stairs to the sprawling dissection lab, where in two days they will meet and become intimate with something many have scarcely encountered: Death. …

There are few better places than Frijoles Mesa to study the mortality of trees. This tongue of land lies partly within the grounds of Los Alamos National Laboratory in northern New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains. To the west rises Cerro Grande, a mountain riddled with the charred skeletons of fir and pine trees. …

Katharina Fabricius plunged from a dive boat into the Pacific Ocean of tomorrow. She kicked through blue water until she spotted a ceramic tile attached to the bottom of a reef. A year earlier, the ecologist from the Australian Institute of Marine Science had placed this small square near a fissure in the sea floor where gas bubbles up from the earth. She hoped the next generation of baby corals would settle on it and take root. …