When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded…

Corals are marine magicians. As colonies of the tiny ocean organisms grow, they transform the calcium that circulates in seawater into enormous limestone reefs. These reefs—which…

For years, Ali Khodadoust walked around with his heart literally open to the world. In 2012 surgeons replaced his aortic arch and unknowingly planted bacteria. The bacteria secreted…

The year was 1962, and it seemed like cell biologist Leonard Hayflick had made a mistake. After all, for 60 years it had been known that human cells were immortal, capable of dividing…

Have you had a birthday recently? Feeling old? Don’t worry—there’s a good chance that you’re younger than your infant self. As an adult, you have billions more new cells and…

In 1979, psychologist Ellen Langer and her students carefully refurbished an old monastery in Peterborough, New Hampshire, to resemble a place that would have existed two decades earlier.…

Ebola doesn’t select people. We haven’t figured out what Ebola virus selects as its natural host, but it’s definitely not humans. Every once in a while, Ebola stumbles upon a…

Most people will remember the clever Got Milk ads, which slapped milk mustaches on celebrities in an effort to get Americans drinking dairy. Milk is sold as something healthy and wholesome—after…

In the early 1990s, Iris Murdoch was writing a new novel, as she’d done 25 times before in her life. But this time something was terribly off. Her protagonist, Jackson, an English…

Three years later Daniel Kreitman still chokes up when he talks about what he saw, and how it changed him. Kreitman, an upholsterer by trade, had taken psilocybin, a hallucinogen derived…