Author: Holly Fortini

Bill Clark/Getty Images Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a […]

Realistic digital spaces need delusions as much as they need detail.

How we broke the world record in high-temperature superconductors.

Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.

When scale confounds our perceptions, stories can clarify them.

The story of the genetically engineered mouse cosmonaut.

Robert Boyle, a founding member of the Royal Society, was part of an “invisible college” of natural philosophers and physicians who lived by the motto: “nullius in verba,” or, “nobody’s word for it.” This gang of 17th century intellectual rebels questioned the dominant views of the time and stuck by the principle that truth could […]

MacArthur Fellow Danielle Bassett says learning works best when you don’t overthink it.

In 1972 the Club of Rome, an international think tank, commissioned four scientists to use computers to model the human future. The result was the infamous Limits to Growth that crashed into world culture like an asteroid from space. Collapse, calamity, and chaos were the media take-aways from the book, even though the authors tried hard to explain […]

Forty years ago, scientists found alien life. Not on another planet, but on Earth, in the deep sea, in places where plumes of steam and nutrients heated by volcanic activity fed entire ecologies of creatures adapted to harness chemical energy rather than energy from the sun. The discovery redefined life’s biophysical possibilities, and scientists and […]