National Geographic paid a visit recently to Edward O. Wilson, one of the great figures in biology and conservation of this, or any, century. Wilson, who turned 90 on June 10, sat in the plant-filled conservatory at his retirement community outside of Boston and reflected on three-quarters of a century of insights into the astounding diversity of species on Earth, the mounting troubles at the intersection of nature and human nature, and strategies for saving wild things and, in so doing, saving ourselves.

When you're a blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman named LaKiesha, life can get complicated. This Ohio woman with a name that blurs racial boundaries says people often treat her as an imposter.

From creator/writer Craig Mazin and director Johan Renck, the five-part HBO mini-series Chernobyl explores how the 1986 nuclear accident become one of the worst human-made catastrophes in history. After the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, Soviet Union suffered a massive explosion that released radioactive material across Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and as far as Scandinavia and western Europe, countless brave men and women sacrificed their own lives, both knowingly and unknowingly, in an attempt to save Europe from unimaginable disaster.

For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town's women. There was no other way of explaining how a woman could wake up with blood and semen stains smeared across her sheets and no memory of the previous night.

After a century, Americans are choosing to live together–transforming not just the buildings we live in, but the way we live in them.

On the latest episode of Recode Decode with Kara Swisher, Harvard University’s Ash Carter joined Kara onstage for a live conversation about AI ethics, government surveillance, how to regulate Google and Facebook, and more. Carter, who was Secretary of Defense under President Obama from 2015 to 2017, said he’s concerned by the lack of transparency around algorithms that are being developed and marketed for the world, including the government.

American food supplies are increasingly channeled through a handful of big companies: Amazon, Walmart, FreshDirect, Blue Apron. What do we lose when local supermarkets go under?

In a major ethical leap for the tech world, Chinese start-ups have built algorithms that the government uses to track members of a largely Muslim minority group.

The long read: At the age of 20, Christopher Knight parked his car on a remote trail in Maine and walked away with only the most basic supplies. He had no plan. His chief motivation was to avoid contact with people. This is his story.

You almost certainly have animals living on your face. You can't see them, but they're there. They are microscopic mites, eight-legged creatures rather like spiders. Almost every human being has them. They spend their entire lives on our faces, where they eat, mate and finally die. Before you start buying extra-strong facewash, you should know that these microscopic lodgers probably aren't a serious problem. They may well be almost entirely harmless. What's more, because they are so common they could help reveal our history in unparalleled detail.

On Tuesday, April 30, actor Peter Mayhew—the actor who played Chewbacca for more than three decades—passed away at the age of 74 at his home in North Texas. As a tribute to the pop culture hero's iconic character, here are 15 things you might not know about Han Solo's BFF.

AirPods are a product of the past. They're plastic, made of some combination of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, chlorine, and sulfur. They’re tungsten, tin, tantalum, lithium, and cobalt. The particles that make up these elements were created 13.8 billion years ago, during the Big Bang. Humans extract these elements from the earth, heat them, refine them. As they work, humans breathe in airborne particles, which deposit in their lungs.

Asia Bibi, the Christian farm labourer who spent eight years on death row in Pakistan for blasphemy, is expected to leave the country after the supreme court upheld her acquittal

When Erika Peña dropped something on the floor of his truck, reached down to pick it up and touched a gun instead, she did not startle. This was Texas – a gun in a truck was not unusual – and she already knew that he needed a firearm for work. Besides, the man driving treated her well, most of the time. There had been one flash of anger when he had broken her phone, but otherwise, she told her mother, he acted “like a gentleman”.

If we don’t trust scientists to be experts in their fields, Hockfield says on the latest episode of Recode Decode, "we have no way of making it into the future."

If, on a certain evening about sixty-­six million years ago, you had stood somewhere in North America and looked up at the sky, you would have soon made out what appeared to be a star. If you watched for an hour or two, the star would have seemed to grow in brightness, although it barely moved. That’s because it was not a star but an asteroid, and it was headed directly for Earth at about forty-five thousand miles an hour.

Around 7 A.M. on September 20, 2017, the wind has become a roaring white wall. In his hotel room, Josh Morgerman presses his hand flat against the trembling glass of the patio door. He’s filming, and his left hand appears in the shot, heavy with the skull-shaped biker ring he bought on the Sunset Strip and the pinky ring he had made in the shape of his brand logo—a lowercase i over the meteorological symbol for a cyclone. The glass flutters under his palm.

Laura Delano recognized that she was “excellent at everything, but it didn’t mean anything,” her doctor wrote. She grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. Her father is related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and her mother was introduced to society at a débutante ball at the Waldorf-Astoria.

April Fabb, 13, vanished while riding her bike 50 years ago - nothing has been heard of her since.

The U.S. government claimed that turning American medical charts into electronic records would make health care better, safer and cheaper. Ten years and $36 billion later, the system is an unholy mess. Inside a digital revolution that took a bad turn.

The rumors spread like wildfire: Muslims were secretly lacing a Sri Lankan village’s food with sterilization drugs. Soon, a video circulated that appeared to show a Muslim shopkeeper admitting to drugging his customers — he had misunderstood the question that was angrily put to him. Then all hell broke loose. Over a several-day span, dozens of mosques and Muslim-owned shops and homes were burned down across multiple towns. In one home, a young journalist was trapped, and perished.

To travel to another star in our galaxy, finding another system of planets, and maybe even finding life there. Such has been the dream for scientists, futurists, and dreamers for centuries. But it has only been within the past century or so that human beings have been able to contemplate this as a serious possibility.

Kraig Sadownikow doesn’t look like an anti-corporate crusader. The mayor of West Bend, Wisconsin, stickers his pickup with a “Don’t Tread on Me” snake on the back window, a GOP elephant on the hitch, and the stars-and-stripes logo of his construction company across the bumper.

The mainstream narrative of esports has been lovingly crafted by those who benefit from its success. There’s big money in esports, they say. You’ve heard the stories. Teenaged gamers flown overseas to sunny mansions with live-in chefs. The erection of $50 million arenas for Enders Game-esque sci-fi battles. League of Legends pros pulling down seven-figure salaries. Yet there’s a reason why these narratives are provocative enough to attract lip-licking headlines in business news and have accrued colossal amounts of venture capital. More and more, esports is looking like a bubble ready to pop.

For the past two decades, a suicide epidemic fueled by guns, poverty and isolation has swept across the West, with middle-aged men dying in record numbers.

During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare.

Investors all over the world fell for the schemes of the man who called himself Khalid bin al-Saud. But the truth turned out to be more incredible than the lie.

The 33 special agents assigned to the Investigative Services Branch handle the most complex crimes committed on NPS land. When a day hike in Rocky Mountain National Park ended in a grisly death, ISB veteran Beth Shott hit the trail, where she began unraveling a harrowing case.

On August 5, 2013, Dutch scientist Mark Post presented to the world the first lab-grown burger ever created. The event took place in London, the burger was cooked by chef Richard McGeown, and only Hanni Ruetzler and Josh Schonwald – two food critics – could taste it. Hanni Ruetzler said that it tasted like meat, “just not as juicy.”

On the new triangle trade, and the surprising connection between modern slavery and ecological disaster.

Nearly every measurement of weight you’ve ever made, from peeking at your bathroom scale to measuring out flour for a recipe, can be traced back to just a single object: a metal kilogram made of platinum and iridium that resides under lock and key in an underground vault in Paris. It’s called the International Prototype Kilogram, or IPK, and since its creation in 1889 it has been the standard by which the world’s weights are defined. But not for much longer.

Gas station hotdogs don't take breaks. You may pull into a rest stop, refill your car’s tank, empty your own, grab some snacks, and peel out again. The whole time, the dogs will have been rotating, slowly, on their shiny metal rollers. When you finally turn in for the night, they may be turning still.

On a late-summer day in Los Angeles, I plan to meet Terry Crews at the Getty Museum because, in addition to everything else Crews does—which, seriously, is everything—he’s a hugely talented visual artist. I figure we’ll go deep on the photography exhibit. I’ll ask: “Terry, what’s the inner monologue of the person in this picture?” Really get my Barbara Walters on. What happens instead is that we get nine steps into the Getty Center, turn to one another, and talk for five solid hours—about toxic masculinity...

When Johansson gets punched in the face, Heidi Moneymaker takes the hit. When Elizabeth Olsen crashes through a window, it's C.C. Ice who ends up with scratches. Hollywood's most unsung behind-the-scenes heroes star in a Hollywood Reporter photo portfolio.

“Are we ready to open the doors?” an event producer in a skintight catsuit asked into a headset. As EDM blasted over a PA system, hundreds flooded into the ballroom of San Diego’s Town & Country resort: tanned-and-toned millennials, a group of friends from Venezuela, an engineer from Lagos, Botoxed retirees, and elderly couples pushing Zimmer frames. They took their seats, awaiting the good news: