After nine weeks of gruelling competition, chef Michael Wray faced his final test. The shy but talented cook had made it through to the final on the first US series of Gordon Ramsay's show Hell's Kitchen. His last challenge was to run his own kitchen in full view of TV cameras and one of the world's most fearsome chefs. It was a test Michael, then aged 27, passed.

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other.

Of all the volcanic eruptions to shake our planet in the last 2 million years, the Toba super-eruption in Sumatra, Indonesia, was one of the most colossal. But it may not have been the global catastrophe we once thought it was.

At a time when the United States and the Soviet Union were poised on the edge of nuclear annihilation, an improbable space mission proved that peace was possible. Join us for this special episode of the Supercluster podcast, as we reach back into space history to bring you the story of the first ever international cooperation in space: The Apollo Soyuz Test Project.

The wagon—and the wagon wheel—could not have been put together in stages. Either it works, or it doesn’t. And it enabled humans to spread rapidly into huge parts of the world.

"When I was younger, someone took a knife to my clitoris and cut out a small but significant part of me. I blamed my mother. I despised her. I loved her." The first and only time I had sex it did not go well. I was twenty-two, a late bloomer by most of popular culture’s standards, and for the year my boyfriend and I had been dating, we’d skirted around the issue. He’d repeated that he was willing to wait, however long it might take me to be ready, and I’d chafed at his understanding...

In residency, there’s a saying: The days are long, but the years are short. In neurosurgical training, the day usually began a little before 6 a.m., and lasted until the operating was done, which depended, in part, on how quick you were in the OR.

Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.

The Pole Vault is a singular and uniquely dangerous sport. The people who do it anyway aren't in it for money. They're in it to fly, and because they're a little crazy. Renaud Lavillenie stares down the runway and up at the bar. His eyes seem to bulge, his eyebrows bounce, his head jerks to the left. He could be cracking his neck; it's more likely the Frenchman is thinking, Putain de merde qui est élevé, or, in English, "Holy shit, that's high."

Nobody ever asks me what it felt like. They never ask what it was like to spend three of my teenage years in secure psychiatric units for severe anorexia nervosa; how it felt to be so undernourished I could hardly walk; how it feels now to be able to picture the doctors’ and nurses’ faces more clearly than I can those of my late grandparents; how it feels to have spent my formative years with young women who are now, in so many cases, dead; how this experience changed my personality for ever.

It's strange how you can interact with someone every day and not know anything about them at all. I work in Lebanon much of the year. When I'm there, I stay in the residential Christian neighborhood of Fanar, about 20 minutes outside of Beirut. I see the natour — the superintendent of my building — when I enter or exit. He's a handsome man in his 30s with a quick, easy smile. I knew he was Syrian, but that was the extent of my knowledge about his life.

The digger Elton McDonald grew up on what’s probably the toughest street in Toronto—maybe even Canada—and he still lives there with his mother and two sisters. Three summers ago, a man got shot in the head behind their townhouse. Elton’s sister Anora Graham went to the man’s aid, pressing a shirt she’d run to fetch against the wound. He died two weeks later. Lots of others here have, too. “Elton went to school with kids who are not alive anymore,” says Anora. “They died when they were 16.”

For years, he was called a madman for toiling away on the rocks. But Dashrath Manjhi was not crazy. His quest to break a path through a small mountain to benefit the entire village is now legendary because he carved an entire road with hand tools, working for 22 years.

The first part of this story may be familiar, especially to those in Western Canada. It starts with a group of backcountry skiers venturing into British Columbia’s Glacier National Park in early 2003, and ends with one of the deadliest avalanches in Canadian history. Seven people lost their lives to the slide. Adding to the horror, the victims were schoolkids. Media coverage focused primarily on the deaths of the seven students. Journalists interviewed grieving parents...

I’ve broken this story up into three chapters. It should never have gone this far, but the internet works in mysterious ways. None of this should have ever happened. It makes absolutely no sense at all. It’s truly crazy.

Danielle Josey Davis had been married only seven months when a devastating motorcycle accident left her husband on life support and in a coma. Doctors recommended letting Matt Davis die because there was a 90 percent chance he would never wake up, but Danielle told ABC News she decided it just wasn't time yet. Then, one day, he woke up.

Adolfo Davis admits he was a swaggering thug by the age of 14 as he roamed and dealt drugs with a South Side gang. He also describes a childhood of emotional and physical deprivation: a mother fixated on crack, an absent father, a grandmother’s overflowing and chaotic apartment. From the age of 6 or 7, he often had to buy his own food or go hungry, so he collected cans, pumped gas for tips and shoplifted.

Dallas Mildenhall used obscure science to crack cases all over the world. Then a murder took place in his own backyard.

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands.

He’d spent years wondering when the other shoe would drop. The revelation had taken him by surprise — the best possible thing that could have happened under the circumstances, his lawyer said — and yet the promise of it weighed too heavily for him to completely go along with it. Part of him was sure it wasn’t true at all.