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The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern [...]

On March 2, 2016, at around 9 A.M. local time, in Kazakhstan, Scott Kelly plunged through the Earth’s atmosphere in a Soyuz spacecraft travelling at seventeen thousand miles an hour. As expected, [...]

Until recently, Guillaume Raineri, a forty-two-year-old man with a bald head and a bushy goatee, worked as an hvac technician in Gonesse, a small town about ten miles north of Paris. The area [...]

In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts and [...]

In 2018, two children in Samoa died after receiving measles vaccines, because the nurses who administered them had mistakenly mixed the vaccine powder with a muscle relaxant. Local vaccine [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump turned in one of his strangest performances in a campaign with no shortage of them—part of a series of oddities that may or may not constitute an October [...]

When I first became a doctor, I cared for an older man whom I’ll call Ted. He was so sick with pneumonia that he was struggling to breathe. His primary-care physician had prescribed one [...]

From the moment that Joe Biden announced his candidacy for President, in 2019, he has been attacked as being too old. At the time, Biden was seventy-six and cast himself as a “transitional” [...]

Ana Santos, a microbiologist at Rice University, grew up in Cantanhede, a small city in Portugal that is known as a biotechnology hub and a source of good wine. When she was a child, her [...]

In December, 2021, a few weeks after the Omicron variant emerged to spark a new, punishing phase of the covid-19 pandemic, Jim Lester’s birds got sick. Lester, who owns an exhibition farm in [...]