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It was all going entirely too well, beginning with the weather. The morning we landed at Isla Hornos, the sea was like glass, and we were ferried ashore under glorious, unblemished skies. This is the location of Cape Horn, mind you, the notorious headlands at the southern tip of the Americas. There’s a monument on […]
In the mid-2000s, William Fisk, a senior scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, stumbled upon two obscure Hungarian studies that challenged common assumptions about the air indoors. The studies suggested that, even at relatively low levels, carbon dioxide could impair how well people thought and worked. Fisk, an indoor–air quality expert who led the Berkeley […]
The campus was shining as only our spectacular splotch of Bay Area real estate can do. Clusters of high school kids posed for pictures at the university they hoped to attend. Cal T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, and athletic jackets sauntered by. Frisbees flew, and a giant dog galloped over to offer a passionate greeting that left […]
Nairobi is a tough town, and there’s no place in Nairobi that’s tougher than Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Maybe a half-million people live there, maybe a million. No one’s really counting. But virtually everyone is desperately poor, with per capita earnings averaging about a dollar a day. Rape, assault, and murder are simple facts of […]
It was late afternoon on a glorious day in October. My friend Natasha and I were picking our way down a country lane, toward the train station in a village about an hour from Moscow’s Kievsky train station. Our close friends, a lesbian couple, owned a dacha in the village, a cozy cottage where a […]
From the start, the whole trip seemed haphazard and conceptually incoherent. What was the rationale, our friends asked, for spending a week in the Czech Republic followed by 10 days in Greece and four in Paris? The simple, reasonable answer: Horse-trading. It was our 20th anniversary and my husband, Dan, and I had learned that […]
Drenched in sweat, I rushed to pack up my cello before the crowd stormed the stage again. It was dark, and all the dancing had filled the hot air with reddish dust. We’d just finished our set, and I couldn’t wait to get my gear locked up in the van so I could relax. But […]
Remember pneumatic tubes, those compressed-air pipelines that whisked plastic canisters from basement mailrooms to penthouse boardrooms? Imagine being in one, traveling at more than 700 mph. You could make the round-trip from San Francisco to LA in a little over an hour. That may sound like science fiction, but it could one day be a […]
It may be time to change our minds about the impossibility of changing people’s minds. Again. Besides your puny life experiences and all of literature and history, there’s mountains of evidence from the social sciences to suggest that it’s nearly impossible to change someone’s mind. It almost doesn’t matter what the subject is—whether you’re trying […]
When we say “internal compass,” we’re usually referring to something metaphorical, a person’s innate sense of right and wrong. But for UC Berkeley microbiologists Arash Komeili and David Hershey, the term is literal: The two study magnetotactic bacteria, which navigate using tiny magnetic iron crystals called magnetosomes. Such bacteria are ubiquitous in lakes, where their […]
1. You’ve been at the forefront of family planning debates for many years and are now working to bring to market an over-the-counter birth control pill for the first time in the United States. What are the public health benefits of readily available contraception? Having worked all over the world to make family planning and […]
