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The Earthquake That Will Devastate the Pacific Northwest (2015)

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Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the...
Flick your right fingers outward, forcefully, so that your hand flattens back down again. When the next very big earthquake hits, the northwest edge of the continent, from California to Canada and the continental shelf to the Cascades, will drop by as much as six feet and rebound thirty to a hundred feet to the west...

earthquakes seismology
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When America First Dropped Acid

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One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and...
One evening in September of 1957, viewers across America could turn on their television sets and tune in to a CBS broadcast during which a young woman dropped acid. She sat next to a man in a suit: Sidney Cohen, the researcher who had given her the LSD. The woman wore lipstick and nail polish, and her eyes were shin...
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A Woman Who Spent Five Hundred Days in a Cave

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When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in...
When Beatriz Flamini was growing up, in Madrid, she spent a lot of time alone in her bedroom. “I really liked being there,” she says. She’d read books to her dolls and write on a chalkboard while giving them lessons in math or history. As she got older, she told me, she sometimes imagined being a professor like Indi...
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Dickson Despommier wants our cities to be like forests

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In 2000, Dickson D. Despommier, then a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University,...
In 2000, Dickson D. Despommier, then a professor of public health and microbiology at Columbia University, was teaching a class on medical ecology in which he asked his students, “What will the world be like in 2050?,” and a follow-up, “What would you like the world to be like in 2050?” As Despommier told The New Yo...

climate change ecology environmentalism science scientists
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Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?

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Intellectual property accounts for some or all of the wealth of at least half of the...
Intellectual property accounts for some or all of the wealth of at least half of the world’s fifty richest people, and it has been estimated to account for fifty-two per cent of the value of U.S. merchandise exports. I.P. is the new oil. Nations sitting on a lot of it are making money selling it to nations that have...
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How Much of the World Is It Possible to Model?

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It’s hard for a neurosurgeon to navigate a brain. A key challenge is gooeyness. The brain...
It’s hard for a neurosurgeon to navigate a brain. A key challenge is gooeyness. The brain is immersed in cerebrospinal fluid; when a surgeon opens the skull, pressure is released, and parts of the brain surge up toward the exit while gravity starts pulling others down. This can happen with special force if a tumor h...

artificial intelligence covid-19 mathematics pandemics statistics
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The Swimmer (1964)

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As soon as Enid Bunker saw him, she began to scream, “Oh, look who’s here! What...
As soon as Enid Bunker saw him, she began to scream, “Oh, look who’s here! What a marvellous surprise! When Lucinda said that you couldn’t come, I thought I’d die. . . .” She made her way to him through the crowd, and when they had finished kissing, she led him to the bar, a progress that was slowed by the fact that...

drinking swimming pools
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Coming of Age at the Dawn of the Social Internet

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Like so many millennials, I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an...
Like so many millennials, I entered the online world through AOL Instant Messenger. I created an account one unremarkable day in the late nineteen-nineties, sitting in the basement of my childhood home at our chunky white desktop computer, which connected to the Internet via a patchy dial-up modem. I picked a userna...

america online digital instagram online social media
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Scholars now argue that early nomadic empires were the architects of modernity

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A common story of Mongol rule, especially in Russian nationalist scholarship, is of punishing subjugation—of an...
A common story of Mongol rule, especially in Russian nationalist scholarship, is of punishing subjugation—of an alien people whose yoke strangled development. Favereau argues otherwise. “The Russian principalities experienced extraordinary economic vitality during their vassalage to the Horde,” she writes, pointing ...
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Did an Abortion Ban Cost a Young Texas Woman Her Life?

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LEGAL NAME OF DECEASEDYeniifer Alvarez-Estrada GlickDATE OF DEATH—ACTUAL OR PRESUMEDJuly 10, 2022MARITAL STATUS AT TIME OF...
LEGAL NAME OF DECEASEDYeniifer Alvarez-Estrada GlickDATE OF DEATH—ACTUAL OR PRESUMEDJuly 10, 2022MARITAL STATUS AT TIME OF DEATH☑ MarriedIF DEATH OCCURRED IN A HOSPITAL☑ ER/OutpatientIF FEMALE☑ Pregnant at time of deathLOCATION (CITY/TOWN AND STATE)Luling, TXMANNER OF DEATH☑ Pending InvestigationYeniifer Alvarez arr...
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The California Town Owned by a New York Investment Firm

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Scotia, California, in Humboldt County, is a tiny place, smaller than a square mile, tucked just...
Scotia, California, in Humboldt County, is a tiny place, smaller than a square mile, tucked just below U.S. Highway 101, which runs from Oregon to Southern California. Most people on the 101 drive right by. “It would be a good place if you were in witness protection,” a Scotia resident told me recently. “No one’s lo...

california investments lumberjacks
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Studies suggest that relying on will power to break habits is hopeless (2019)

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books experiments habits marshmallows psychology
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What We Lost When Twitter Became X

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A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an...
A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk began his reign at Twitter with an elaborately staged pun. On Wednesday, October 26, 2022, he posted a tweet with a video that showed him carrying a sink through the lobby of the company’s San Francisco headquarters. “Entering Twitter HQ—let that sink in!” he wrote. At the ti...

acquisitions elon musk layoffs social media twitter
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How a script doctor found his own voice

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After “Out of Sight,” he was inundated by rewrite offers. Frank adheres to an informal code...
After “Out of Sight,” he was inundated by rewrite offers. Frank adheres to an informal code of discretion when it comes to this sort of work, but when I pressed him he said, “Ninety per cent of what I get called in on is character work.” In “Saving Private Ryan,” he helped round out such soldiers as the Scripture-qu...
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An Elegy for the Jewish Retirees of Miami Beach

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In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Miami Beach was Rat Pack glamorous: a tropical tourist attraction with...
In the nineteen-fifties and sixties, Miami Beach was Rat Pack glamorous: a tropical tourist attraction with lavish shoreline hotels offering performances by stars like Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason. But, by the seventies, the city’s popularity as an entertainment and tourism capital had waned; instead, Miami Beac...

florida miami photography retirement review
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The Year of Ozempic

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A century ago, August Krogh, a Danish physiologist who had just won the Nobel Prize, embarked...
A century ago, August Krogh, a Danish physiologist who had just won the Nobel Prize, embarked on a U.S. lecture tour. Krogh studied the intricate network of blood vessels that nourish our muscles, but he was increasingly interested in diabetes—a condition that his wife, the physician Marie Krogh, not only treated bu...

diabetes drugs medicine obesity pharmaceuticals
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