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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

Birds are, quite literally, the proverbial “canary in the coal mine.” How birds fare in the world indicates how all wildlife and habitat, and by extension human populations, will fare. It is not just poetry that led Rachel Carson to title her seminal work Silent Spring. All the past administrations for which we have worked have struck a balance and worked diligently and in good faith with industries that had significant impacts on birds...

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.

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”.

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

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

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.

When my son Sam,* who was then 14, asked me to take him to the Mother of All Rallies on the Mall in September 2017, I said no. The pro-Trump event was billed as a demonstration to preserve “traditional American culture,” and white supremacists were expected to show up in force. Not only was this not how I wanted to spend a Saturday—like almost everyone I knew, I’d been devastated by the 2016 election results—but I had serious concerns about safety. At Charlottesville’s Unite the Right rally only a month earlier, a neo-Nazi had killed counterprotester Heather Heyer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I bought an 11” iPad Pro to use it as my main development machine. Let me say it’s an attempt. I’m a huge fan of Bret Victor and try to immerse myself with his ideas, papers, and videos. One of the things he talks about is how we should look into new mediums to unleash our creativity, to create “things” that were not possible before.

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?