The contraband is scary enough: Homemade knives with grips whittled to fit particular hands. Homemade machetes. And homemade armor, with books and magazines for padding. Then there is the blood: In puddles. In toilets. Scrawled on the wall in desperate messages. Bloody scalps, bloody footprints, blood streaming down a cheek like tears. And the dead: a man kneeling like a supplicant, hands bound behind his back with white fabric strips and black laces. Another, hanging from a twisted sheet in the dark, virtually naked, illuminated by a flashlight beam.

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.

A strange man sitting at the table next to — and apparently within smelling range — of Jodie Comer has just leaned a little farther in, his sense of smell activated by an odor wafting his way. “Excuse me,” he murmurs into her ear, unsure if he should. “What perfume are you wearing? Is it … it smells so familiar.”

Ahead of 'Avengers: Endgame,' the progressive Captain America actor and Twitter firebrand says he's ready to retire his Marvel hero for directing gigs, a new Apple show and the fight against the "dumb s—" president: “I’d be disappointed in myself if I didn’t speak up.”

Just when all my childhood dreams seemed to have come true, I nearly lost my mind and then my life. I’ve never told this story publicly, but now it’s time. It was the beginning of 2011. I had just finished filming the first season of “Game of Thrones,” a new HBO series based on George R. R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” novels. With almost no professional experience behind me, I’d been given the role of Daenerys Targaryen, also known as Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea, Lady of Dragonstone, Breaker of Chains, Mother of Dragons.

Is the Army botching its investigations into noncombatant deaths?

Not long ago, a 4-year-old boy died of the flu. His mother, under doctor's orders, watched his two little brothers like a hawk, terrified they might get sick and die, too. Grieving and frightened, just days after her son's death she checked her Facebook page hoping to read messages of comfort from family and friends. Instead, she found dozens of hateful comments: You're a terrible mother. You killed your child. You deserved what happened to your son. This is all fake - your child doesn't exist.

South Carolina sheriffs have embezzled, bribed and dipped into public funds for expensive chauffeurs. They’ve driven drunk and bullied other public officials. They’ve been accused of leveraging their power to sexually assault their female employees. While many South Carolina sheriffs have strong records of serving the public, others served themselves and their cronies, a five-month Post and Courier investigation found.

I was honored when MIT Technology Review invited me to be the first guest curator of its 10 Breakthrough Technologies. Narrowing down the list was difficult. I wanted to choose things that not only will create headlines in 2019 but captured this moment in technological history—which got me thinking about how innovation has evolved over time.

What he does care a great deal about is acting and movies (and golf—he is coy about his handicap but acknowledges it lies in low single digits), and he approaches his craft with both a childlike love for the medium and a specialist’s obsession with technique. This combination has led him to enjoy one of the most prolific film careers of any actor alive, despite his relatively late-in-life big break. Perhaps only Nicolas Cage comes close to achieving Jackson’s ability to pop up across a pantheon of wildly disparate title...

In February 2015, amid the cedar masks, canoe paddles and totem poles at the Tulalip Resort Casino north of Seattle, the talk was all about pot. Indian country had been abuzz about cannabis since the previous autumn, when the Justice Department had released a memorandum which seemed to open the way for tribal cannabis as a manifestation of tribal sovereignty. (I grew up Ojibwe on a reservation in Minnesota, and I use the word “Indian” to refer to indigenous people within the US.

At an open-air hospital in northern Ghana, Donald Hopkins watched a small girl endure a medical ordeal unseen in the United States. It was 2007, and four-year-old Rafia Fusseini was getting treated for Guinea worm, a parasite that infected her after she drank contaminated water and then grew inside her body. Now it was burrowing out through her skin. Rafia sat on a chair, dressed in a blue-and-red print blouse...

There is a big shortfall between the amount of food we produce today and the amount needed to feed everyone in 2050. There will be nearly 10 billion people on Earth by 2050—about 3 billion more mouths to feed than there were in 2010. As incomes rise, people will increasingly consume more resource-intensive, animal-based foods. At the same time, we urgently need to cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agricultural production and stop conversion of remaining forests to agricultural land.

Let's imagine that we've ended global warming. Humans no longer are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Here's what life is like in a zero-carbon world.

Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he’d spent the day squiring Venter around campus.

We are all going to die! In physiological terms the deaths that all will die will be broadly similar, in the sense that either suddenly and unexpectedly or maybe over a long period of time, the systems that keep us active and sentient will cease to function. However, throughout the world, people make important distinctions between a body that has expired and a dead person; that is, as someone who is connected to others through complex social relations which bring into question any simple notion of a finite ending.

Julia Rohrer wants to create a radical new culture for social scientists. A personality psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Rohrer is trying to get her peers to publicly, willingly admit it when they are wrong. To do this, she, along with some colleagues, started up something called the Loss of Confidence Project. It’s designed to be an academic safe space for researchers to declare for all to see that they no longer believe in the accuracy of one of their previous findings.

“The joy of science lies in pondering the magnificent and seeking answers to the unknown,” writes Jonathon McPhetres, a PhD candidate in psychology at the University of Rochester, and the author of a new study published in the journal Cognition & Emotion. McPhetres finds that feeling awe leads to greater awareness of the things we don’t know, which in turn makes us more likely to seek out a framework to fill those gaps. Science is one such framework.

Whether it’s named or used anonymously, Corning’s Gorilla Glass has been a key ingredient in smartphones since the first iPhone — except for folding phones, where the screens are covered in flexible plastic. The reason: Corning says that it’s still working on flexible glass that will meet the specific needs of smartphone users, a development process that could take a couple of years.

R. Kelly appeared to be physically restrained during an emotional television interview in which he tearfully and angrily denied accusations that he raped underage girls in his first interview since his indictment last month. 'Quit playing, I didn’t do this stuff,' the pop singer tearfully told Gayle King of CBS News on Tuesday. ‘This is not me. I’m fighting for my f*****g life.’ King posted a photo on her Instagram showing moments from her sit-down with R. Kelly.