This story originally appeared on Reveal and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. William Whitt suffered violent diarrhea for days. But once he began vomiting blood, he knew it was time to rush to the hospital. His body swelled up so much that his wife thought he looked like the Michelin Man, and on the inside, his intestines were inflamed and bleeding.

Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort held secret talks with Julian Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and visited around the time he joined Trump’s campaign, the Guardian has been told. Sources have said Manafort went to see Assange in 2013, 2015 and in spring 2016 – during the period when he was made a key figure in Trump’s push for the White House.

The next time you brush aside a spiderweb, you might want to meditate on its delicate strength—if human-size, it would be tough enough to snag a jetliner. Now, scientists know just how these silken strands get their power: through thousands of even smaller strands that stick together to form this critter’s clingy trap.

Eviation’s Alice is an all-electric, nine-person aircraft that may help replace fossil fuel-burning commuter planes.

He Jiankui claims he created twin girls who had been edited so they were resistant to HIV. Was that ethical? Or even legal?

A Chinese researcher claims that he helped make the world's first genetically edited babies — twin girls whose DNA he said he altered with a powerful new tool capable of rewriting the very blueprint of life. If true, it would be a profound leap of science and ethics. A U.S. scientist said he took part in the work in China, but this kind of gene editing is banned in the United States because the DNA changes can pass to future generations and it risks harming other genes. Many mainstream scientists think it's too unsafe to try, and some denounced the Chinese report as human experimentation.

On Monday afternoon, NASA’s InSight spacecraft will try to land on Mars.

Conspiracies surrounding NASA’s moon missions nearly 50 years ago are common in Russia.

New Scientist calls for the end of the scholarly publishing industry:

Between 600,000 and 800,000 bitcoin miners have shut down since mid-November amid declines in price and hashrate across the network, F2pool's founder estimates.

When people have a hole in their life, they often fill it with angry politics.

Over the past several months, I’ve watched, read and heard much about the potential Armageddon facing the profession of journalism. I’ve watched colleagues proclaim that “fake news” attacks by President Trump, crowd chants of “enemies” and the expulsion of CNN’s Jim Acosta from the White House press room pose the greatest threats to news reporting in history. I respectfully disagree.

Could nasal breathing be more helpful for our brains than breathing through the mouth?

Parliament has used its legal powers to seize internal Facebook documents in an extraordinary attempt to hold the US social media giant to account after chief executive Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly refused to answer MPs’ questions. The cache of documents is alleged to contain significant revelations about Facebook decisions on data and privacy controls that led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. It is claimed they include confidential emails between senior executives, and correspondence with Zuckerberg.

In his new book, David Graeber examines the decoupling of work from meaningful activity.

Governments are ratcheting up the pressure on a mechanism some see as gambling

A giant, plant-eating creature with a beak-like mouth and reptilian features may have roamed the Earth during the late Triassic period more than 200 million years ago, scientists said Thursday.

The ritual burial could be linked to a huge previously undiscovered Iron Age settlement.

A neuroscientist’s research into the mysteries of motion helps a paralyzed woman escape her body.

In our two-part series, Ars looks at what Snowden's disclosures have wrought politically and institutionally.

Officials say aim is to make it ‘difficult to move’ for those deemed ‘untrustworthy’

Benjamin Franklin knew he was smart — smarter than most of his peers — but he was also intelligent enough to understand that he couldn’t be right about everything. That’s why he said that whenever he was about to make an argument, he would open with something along the lines of, “I could be wrong, but…” Saying this put people at ease and helped them to take disagreements less personally. But it also helped him to psychologically prime himself to be open to new ideas.

The White House legal team reportedly torpedoed the meeting after hearing the planned scope of the interview.

Indian media has identified the man as either an

Brain cells are some of the only body cells that can perform these alterations

As the Leonid meteor shower was lighting up skies with bright fireballs over the past week, some bigger space rocks were also zipping over us. No fewer than six asteroids have flown closer to Earth than the distance to the moon, including the second-closest pass of the year.

Law and medicine still rely on the device. Maybe they shouldn’t.

Robbie Barrat shared code to generate art with AI. To his surprise, a Paris collective used it to create a portrait that sold at Christie's.

What creates the colors in Jupiter's clouds? No one is sure. The thick atmosphere of Jupiter is mostly hydrogen and helium, elements which are colorless at the low temperatures of the Jovian cloud tops. Which trace elements provide the colors remains a topic of research, although small amounts of ammonium hydrosulfide are one leading candidate. What is clear from the featured color-enhanced image -- and many similar images -- is that lighter clouds are typically higher up than darker ones. Pictured, light clouds swirl around reddish regions toward the lower right, while they appear to cover over some darker domains on the upper right.