Science & Tech

Four  EXHALE     Every morning at 9:00, after Olsson and I have finished our testing and split off for solo time, I roll out a mat on my living room floor and work on becoming a little more immortal.  The…Read more

THREE  STAIR MASTERS  IN THE MID-NINETEENTH CENTURY, New York City was a veritable death trap. Yellow fever plagued the ports. Cholera soaked the streets. Tuberculosis tore through tenement buildings. By 1863, New York’s annual mortality rate had climbed to one…Read more

Introduction  The Age of Wreckers and Exterminators  Bikini Atoll, Pacific Ocean, July 22, 1946  For weeks the forty-two thousand soldiers had been preparing. They had relocated the eleven local families who lived on Bikini Island, a lush tropical paradise with…Read more

2  Who We Are  There was a time when the countless tribes of men, though wide dispersed,  Oppressed the surface of the deep-bosomed Earth.  —Stasinus, The Cypria (c. 750 B.C.)  Eighteen hundred years before the birth of Christ, the people…Read more

IN THE EARLY 1980s, not long after I was born, the miniseries Cosmos aired on PBS. My parents tuned in, along with millions of other American households, a public-broadcasting record. For thirteen Sunday evenings in a row, they held my…Read more

CHAPTER 5  THE PLASTIC SEA AROUND US  WE’RE DOWN TO THE WIRE. We’re scheduled to leave port on this first official expedition to the gyre on August 15, 1999, and already it’s late July. As per Curt Ebbesmeyer’s advice, my…Read more

In ancient times, the world must have seemed pretty arbitrary. Disasters such as floods, plagues, earthquakes or volcanoes must have seemed to happen without warning or apparent reason. Primitive people attributed such natural phenomena to a pantheon of gods and…Read more

  Leon Lederman has had second thoughts. He knows what he has done, but he can’t take it back. It’s just one of those small things that has enormous unexpected consequences.  We’re speaking, of course, of the “God Particle.” Not…Read more

THE MOST EXTRAORDINARY thing in the universe is inside your head. You could travel through every inch of outer space and very possibly nowhere find anything as marvelous and complex and high functioning as the three pounds of spongy mass…Read more