In 1979, psychologist Ellen Langer and her students carefully refurbished an old monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to resemble a place that would have existed two decades earlier.…

Ebola doesn’t select people. We haven’t figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it’s definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a…

Most people will remember the clever Got Milk ads, which slapped milk mustaches on celebrities in an effort to get Americans drinking dairy. Milk is sold as something healthy and wholesome—after…

In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she’d done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English…

Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived…

In 2007, David Smith, a doctor of internal medicine and founder of a company that makes wound dressings, gave a presentation at a medical conference in Maryland. Afterward an audience…

Kaylee Byers crouches in a patch of urban blackberries early one morning this June, to check a live trap in one of Vancouver’s poorest areas, the V6A postal code. Her first catch…

It’d be easy to miss the unobtrusive brown door to Joon Yun’s second floor office, tucked away next to a dry cleaners and a hair salon in downtown Palo Alto, California. But the…

“All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits, and their entrances, And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.”…

One day in late December 1899, Elie Metchnikoff, one of the world’s most famous biologists, woke up to discover he had found the key to immortality. That, at least, was what the…