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NASA Earth Observatory The Mystery of 'Venus's Hair' After a Volcanic Eruption
How do long, white filaments grow out of barren rock?
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Robert Jordan / AP The Government's Weed Is Terrible
… and that’s a big problem for medical marijuana research.
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The Glowing Plant project Whatever Happened to the Glowing Plant Kickstarter?
The project seized on one of the most romantic fantasies of synthetic biology.
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Jeff Chiu / AP Crest Has a Terrible Leaking-Toothpaste Problem
The mess made me appreciate good toothpaste-tube design.
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Susan Walsh / AP Why the University of California Is Appealing the CRISPR Patent Decision
There's a lot of money to be made in gene-editing technology.
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Horst Mahr / Getty How a Mormon Church-Owned Site Defeated Craigslist in Utah
The unusual success of KSL Classifieds
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John Moore / Getty Addicts Who Can't Get Opioids Are Overdosing on a Diarrhea Drug
“We’ve had patients tell us they take 400 to 500 tablets day … They put it in a blender and make a smoothie and drink it over one or two hours.”
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George Poinar Jr. / Oregon State University The Scientist Who Stumbled Upon a Tick Full of 20-Million-Year-Old Blood
He’s the same scientist who inspired Jurassic Park.
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Mel Evans / AP Collecting DNA From Sex Workers to One Day Identify Their Bodies
Bioethicists studying a small program in Dallas were surprised by what they found.
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James Gathany Mosquitoes, Get Ready for Your Close-Up
An interview with the CDC’s scientific photographer
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John Locher / AP The White House Revives a Controversial Plan for Nuclear Waste
Yucca Mountain is back, and Nevadans are not happy.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters All the Ways Trump’s Budget Cuts Science Funding
From the EPA, to the NIH, and NASA, research is not a priority in the administration’s fiscal blueprint.
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A Century Later, the Factory That Poisoned the ‘Radium Girls’ Is Still a Superfund Site
In the 1920s, young women worked in an Ottawa, Illinois, factory painting radioactive glow-in-the-dark numbers onto watches. They were told…
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Michaela Rehle / Reuters The Case of the Dead Dog, the Bullet, and the Geneticist Who Solved It
A mysterious hunting accident provides a new test for wildlife forensics.
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Andrew Kelly / Reuters The Loopholes in the Law Prohibiting Genetic Discrimination
GINA only applies to health insurance and employment, but a new Republican bill would weaken even those protections.
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Greg Wood / Reuters The Search for MH370 Revealed Secrets of the Deep Ocean
A remote part of the Indian Ocean has become, by chance, one of the best-mapped parts of the underwater world.
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Pablo Martinez Monsivai / AP How Pharma Companies Use 'Citizen Petitions' to Keep Drug Prices High
Ninety-two percent of citizen petitions filed against generics come from brand-name drug companies.
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National Park Service The 'Dark Matter' of the Microbial World
You've probably heard about your gut bacteria—now get to know your gut archaea.
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The Best Email I've Ever Received From a Scientist
When I first contacted Nikolai Formozov about his paper on a 30,000-year-old squirrel originally found by Gulag prisoners, which…
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Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences An Ice-Age Squirrel Found by Gulag Prisoners Gets Its Scientific Due
“We should be very thankful to those unnamed prisoners who saved those carcasses.”
