Articles of the Week

Regulation-induced monocultures meet unfortunate but explicable engineering decisions.

For the first time a fully mechanical heart, which uses the same technology as high-speed rail lines, has been implanted inside a human being.

A new study links the vulture decline in India to deadly bacteria spread, causing about 500,000 deaths.

Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where and when the first Indo-European languages were spoken and what kind of lives those first speakers led

Environmental evidence of the very first experiments in the evolution of complex life on Earth, has been uncovered by an international team of scientists.

For decades, people have tried to bring mass production methods to housing: to build houses the way we build cars.

Aleksanteri Kivimäki was a hacker wunderkind with a mean streak. Now he’s on trial for the largest crime in Finland’s history.

Chile is so long, it's curved. How long is it? Why not longer? Why is no other country as thin? How does that make Chileans incomprehensible?

When a botched imperial-to-metric conversion left a commercial jet with insufficient fuel, pilots had to improvise.

How a team of spies in Mexico got their hands on Russia's space secrets—and tried to change the course of the Cold War.

Jason Belmonte’s two-handed technique made him an outcast. Then it made him the greatest—and changed the sport forever.

The inside story of how the streamer muscled its way to the top by defying the industry’s conventions — and eventually paid the price.

Almost six years after Barry and Honey Sherman became two of the wealthiest people ever to be murdered, police still haven’t identified the killers. But along the way, they’ve turned up no shortage of potential suspects—and a bare-knuckle family drama.

The Chudnovsky brothers yearned to probe the mystery of pi, so they built their own supercomputer out of mail-order parts.

He was a gifted coder who could have gotten a job at any tech company. He decided to go in another direction.

How a rogue Romanian economist escaped poverty, wrote an algorithm, and gamed more than a dozen lotteries around the world.

He got picked to try a three-quarter-court shot during a Bulls game. He made it, sending Michael Jordan and the Bulls into an all-out frenzy because he had won $1 million. Or so everybody thought.