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Chapter one
Civilization


How the Oil Pipeline Began
Pipeline fights have a longer history than you think.

Monsters, Marvels, and the Birth of Science
How the unlikely and unexplainable, strange and terrifying, spawned the age of science.

How Aging Research Is Changing Our Lives
An interview with Eric Verdin, CEO of the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.
Chapter two
From Here to There

Why New York Is Just an Average City
Understanding any city requires understanding how all cities scale.

How We Really Tamed the Dog
A daring experiment builds a new tame species in just 60 years.

The Fly in the Primordial Soup
Hydrothermal vent models transform the origins of life from unlikely to near-inevitable.

Ingenious: Jack Gilbert
The professor of surgery explains how health emerges from a healthy microbiome.
Chapter three
Out of the Wild

Should You Feed Your Kid Probiotics?
It’s not as simple as you think.

The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks
Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.

How Do You Say “Life” in Physics?
A new theory sheds light on the emergence of life’s complexity.

How to Hear Like a Champion Birder
Take a walk with the man building a Shazam for birds.
Chapter four
Open Your Eyes

Claude Shannon, the Las Vegas Shark
The father of information theory built a machine to game roulette, then abandoned it.

Gold Mining for Profit and Paleontology
How the Gold Rush and Fossil Rush came together.

How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music
I wanted to build the ideal collaborator. Was I ever surprised.

As the World Collapses
An exclusive glimpse into Jeff VanderMeer’s new apocalyptic novel, “Borne.”
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