The Day after the massive explosion in Beirut, residents were surveying the damage to their homes. One video shared online showed 78-year-old Beirut resident May Melki playing the piano in what appears to be her destroyed living room. Her entire home is damaged: furniture in disarray, shattered glass everywhere, curtains ripped apart....
Most summer days on the Danish island of Læsø, you’ll find Henning Johansen at work. A native islander, Johansen is a thatcher. But on Læsø, a thatcher’s job is unlike anywhere else. Nineteen kilometres off the north-east coast of Jutland, the island appears in Norse mythology as the home of...
Gli the cat is the guardian of the gorgeous historic architecture. She roams around the place with style as if she owns it. With thousands of Instagram followers and even a former U.S. president as a fan, Gli the cat is almost as famous as her home, Istanbul’s ancient Hagia...
“Simply put, you believe that things or people make you unhappy, but this is not accurate. You make yourself unhappy.” – Wayne Dyer “Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.” – Marcus Aurelius It is usually pretty easy...
Southern China’s rainy season lasted nearly twice as long this year. Record rainfall caused the country’s longest river, the Yangtze, to overflow along the river’s middle and lower regions. “A normal rainy season is about 24 days,” said Xiquan Dong, an extreme weather expert at the University of Arizona. “This...
Religion is not just about faith and belief. It is a robust idea that defines the lifestyle. All around the world, religion has been shaping people’s lives in more than how they worship or believe in the divinity. Likewise, decades ago, the culture of one of the prominent civilizations was...
It was the muddy water that caught Stefan Talke’s eye. In the mid-2000s Talke was a postdoctoral scholar at Utrecht University, studying the river Ems that empties into the North Sea between Germany and the Netherlands. Decades earlier, engineers had begun dredging parts of the Ems so that newly built...
“To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.” – Henry David Thoreau “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson Some days are great, better than you would have expected when you rolled out...
Like the Black Death spreading along the trade-routes strung along the spine of 14th-Century Eurasia, Covid-19 emerged in China and spread extremely quickly along the modern-day Silk Roads: intercontinental flight paths. Although the coronavirus may not hit global health as catastrophically as the bubonic plague did in the 14th Century,...
On the high-speed train gliding smoothly from Berlin to Düsseldorf, a young man started chatting to me. He eventually asked, “What are some of the cultural differences you’ve noticed between Germans and Americans?” As if on cue, a middle-aged woman hovered over us and gave a harsh, “Shh!” with her...
Ten million deaths per year. It’s an unfathomable figure, but one that Gerald Larrouy-Maumus mentions often. It is the potential toll facing the world as disease-causing microbes develop resistance to our best defence against them – antibiotics. Currently, 700,000 people die each year of drug-resistant diseases. Over the past decade...
In the haze of an overcast April afternoon, the rust-stained hull of the Andrey Dolgov slapped its way through the ocean swell, oily water gushing from the ship’s waterlogged bilge as it made a desperate attempt to flee. Pursued by a sleek, heavily armed naval patrol boat, the ungainly fishing...
As many countries ease lockdown restrictions, residents are returning to old spaces that now feel unfamiliar. The places themselves did not change – but from wearing masks to avoiding crowds, the way we are allowed to navigate them is going to be radically different. Many of these changes may remain...
“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.” – Buddha “People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it.” – Edith Schaeffer One common way to get...
As Covid-19 cases fill the world’s hospitals, among the sickest and most likely to die are those whose bodies react in a signature, catastrophic way. Immune cells flood into the lungs and attack them, when they should be protecting them. Blood vessels leak, and the blood itself clots. Blood pressure...
The novel coronavirus pandemic, known as Covid-19, could not have been more predictable. From my own reporting, I knew this first-hand. In October 2019, I attended a simulation involving a fictional pandemic, caused by a novel coronavirus, that killed 65 million people, and in the spring of 2017 I wrote...
Physicists have finally captured a superconductor’s wave. The first direct evidence of a phase of matter known as a pair-density wave helps reveal the physics that underlies mysterious high-temperature superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance at surprisingly high temperatures. The wave was detected using a scanning tunneling electron microscope, researchers report...
On 8 September 1941, Nazi forces surrounded Leningrad from the west and south, and through Finland to the north. A thin strip of land across Lake Ladoga kept the residents in touch with the rest of Russia, but heavy shelling made it impossible to evacuate the population. This was the...
By 1998, after 12 years in orbit, Russian space station Mir was showing its age. Power cuts were frequent, the computers unreliable and the climate control system was leaking. But when the crew began a study to assess the types of microbes they were sharing their living space with, even...
In a matter of months, the world has been transformed. Thousands of people have already died, and hundreds of thousands more have fallen ill, from a coronavirus that was previously unknown before appearing in the city of Wuhan in December 2019. For millions of others who have not caught the...
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