The Last Days Of John Allen Chau
In the fall of 2018, the 26-year-old American missionary traveled to a remote speck of sand and jungle in the Indian Ocean, attempting to convert one of the planet’s last uncontacted tribes to Christianity. The islanders killed him, and Chau was pilloried around the world as a deluded Christian supremacist who deserved to die.
The Professor, The Bikini Model And The Suitcase Full Of Trouble
A world-renowned physicist meets a gorgeous model online. They plan their perfect life together. But first, she asks, would he be so kind as to deliver a special package to her?
Russian Cows Fitted With Virtual-Reality Headsets
The grass is greener in a virtual world. That’s what Moscow region farmers were aiming for when they fitted their dairy cows with virtual-reality headsets to test their milk production. “Experts noted reduced anxiety and improved overall emotional mood in the herd” during the VR experiment, said the regional agriculture administration.
The Economist With A Radical Plan To Solve Wealth Inequality
Thomas Piketty’s 753-page book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”, published in 2013, sold 2.5 million copies worldwide and helped put inequality on the global agenda. But his latest, the even thicker “Capital and Ideology”, may prove still more influential.
The Primal Pleasure And Brutal History Of Sugar
In the Western imagination, sugar is pleasure, temptation, and vice — and in modern history, it is original sin. How a taste for sweetness, developed for survival, became a stand-in for everything good — and evil — about our culture.
Human Terrain, Visualizing The World’s Population In 3D
Kinshasa is now bigger than Paris. Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Shenzhen are forming an epic, 40 million-person super city. Over the past 30 years, the scale of population change is hard to grasp. How do you even visualize 10 million people?
How Drought-Struck Spain Is Becoming a “Desert”
Spain is running out of water. It suffered a long ‘mega drought’, lack of rainfall and record temperatures. Now their water reservoirs are depleting. Over-exploitation and climate change are causing it to turn into a desert. 75% of their land is under the process of desertification. Can Spain come out of this?
The Climate Activists Who Dismiss Meat Consumption Are Wrong
All too frequently, activists, politicians, and scientists reduce the all-consuming crisis of global warming to a question of greenhouse gas emissions: what drives them up, and how best to bring them down. The natural world and its nonhuman inhabitants are reduced to a series of models and equations.
Behind The Scenes At Rotten Tomatoes
Humans, not algorithms, determine those ubiquitous scores. The Tomatometer is run by a team of “curators” who read just about every known review from a gigantic pool of approved critics, then decide if each is positive or negative. Once a movie has five reviews, it is Tomatometer-eligible.
How Earth Would Look If All The Ice Melted
As National Geographic showed us, sea levels would rise by 216 feet if all the land ice on the planet were to melt. This would dramatically reshape the continents and drown many of the world’s major cities.
The Race To Develop The Moon
For science, profit, and pride, China, the U.S., and private companies are hunting for resources on the lunar surface. It’s not difficult to imagine moon development, like all development, proceeding less than peacefully, and less than equitably.
Inside Wisconsin’s Disastrous $4.5 Billion Deal With Foxconn
A huge tax break was supposed to create a manufacturing paradise, but interviews with 49 people familiar with the project depict a chaotic operation unlikely to ever employ 13,000 workers.
How The Nile Can Provide Life And Divide Nations
The Nile river plays a central role for all nations through which it flows and it forces them to cooperate. At the same time, the sharing of water can also lead to tensions. This video focuses on these two aspects by looking at two construction projects along the Nile.
The Future’s Green For Copenhagen
Copenhagen has already earned its reputation as Europe’s capital of style and sustainability. Now the city is embarking on some of the world’s most ambitious architecture projects in a bid to become the greenest on earth.
Malaysia’s $100BN Smart Island City
In an effort to further boost its economy and leverage its unique position on the doorstep of Singapore, Malaysia are raising four artificial islands from the waters of the Johor Strait and constructing a USD $100BN smart city from scratch.
Why Recycling Isn’t Quite Working Anymore
Is recycling worth it? When it first took off recycling was seen as one of the environmental movement’s great successes. But recent market forces have made more and more countries reconsider the cost of going green.
The Forgotten Tiger King Of Harlem
Antoine Yates spent three years living peacefully inside his New York City apartment with his ‘roommate’ — a 450-pound Siberian tiger named Ming. Until, that is, Ming’s animal instincts kicked in and he mauled Yates in the middle of their kitchen.
The Trailblazing Doctor Who Helped A Mob Boss Cheat Death — And Changed History
Dr. Barbara Roberts, a groundbreaking woman in medicine, treated — and fell in love with — the most brutal and dangerous men alive. Then, some say, she helped bring down New England’s biggest crime family.
Larry Krasner’s Lonely, Radical Crusade To Solve America’s Gun Problem
Unlike traditional prosecutors, Krasner does not measure success by accumulating convictions and toting up lengthy prison sentences. Instead, he has promised to address abuses by the criminal justice system and imprison fewer people for less time. And he thinks all of that can drive down gun crime.
The Drone Boat Of ‘Shipwreck Alley’
Divers flock from all over the world to see the wrecks for themselves each year — and last spring, they were joined by an unusual interloper: an autonomous boat named BEN. BEN is a self-driving boat that’s been tasked with making maps, and to help lay bare the long-lost secrets of the lakebed.
Money Laundering: The Art Of Cleaning Dirty Money
Money laundering is the lifeblood of our profession of organized crime. Without it, there’s no point in committing crimes in the first place if the money we get isn’t usable. Here’s how money laundering works.