Category: Story

A jump with the exact proportions of the launch ramp for snowboarding’s big air event, which will make its Olympic debut in Pyeongchang, does not exist in nature. It must be built. And so, fewer than a dozen times a year, at venues ranging from ballparks to parking lots, impeccably orchestrated teams of engineers, ice…

The history-rattling Season 1 finale of Pose concluded just as it commenced: with a ball. Born of Steven Canals and Ryan Murphy, the darling FX show—which spotlights black and Latin queer performers, specifically trans women, in New York City's late-1980s underground ball scene—became a small revolution on TV, but not entirely for its most obvious…

In 1994, a Mormon family bought a 480-acre plot in in Utah’s Uintah Basin, thinking they’d get back to the land. But this particular land was weird. It came with too-large-thrice-over wolves that refused to die by bullet, cattle with their reproductive organs sucked clean out, and a multitude of UFOs, as they told the…

From Avengers: Infinity War to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, 2018 was a game-changing year for comic book movies. Not only did superheroes continue to dominate at the box office, but they also, for the first time ever, found their way into the Best Picture Oscar race—thanks to the massively successful Black Panther. Last year was…

Natural selection has been a cornerstone of evolutionary theory ever since Darwin. Yet mathematical models of natural selection have often been dogged by an awkward problem that seemed to make evolution harder than biologists understood it to be. In a new paper appearing in Communications Biology, a multidisciplinary team of scientists in Austria and the…

Nothing has followed Spider-Man's long and varied character history quite like one single phrase: "With great power comes great responsibility." Generally attributed to Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, it long ago left the world of Marvel Comics to become a general-purpose exhortation, deployed by everyone from heads of state to the Supreme Court. At this point,…

Few things in this world are as exhausting as interacting with humans. You’ve got to maintain eye contact (ugh) and watch for subtle body language (ugh) and pay attention the whole time (ugh). And if you think that’s tough, wait until you start interacting with robots, which aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer just…

How many times did you see Avengers: Infinity War? Once, twice, three times, a-maybe? No matter how many viewings it warranted, chances are there's something you missed—an Easter egg, a character flaw, a long-forgotten scene from a past film. (Did you remember Ayo had a face-off with Black Widow in Captain America: Civil War? We…

Ask the internet for antiaging tips and you’ll find advice ranging from Goop-y frivolities to dangerous shams. “Aging has always been a target for charlatans and snake oil salemen,” says John Newman, a geriatrics researcher at UC San Francisco and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. But as researchers begin to understand how aging…

Brand-influencer relationships used to be as simple as a YouTuber standing next to a man dressed as a giant tongue. At the very first Vidcon, in 2010, the tongue-scraper company Orabrush sent a bumpy pink mascot to the convention center to strike up quasi-impromptu interactions with early influencers like iJustine. When you fast-forward to the…