Delivering Amazon packages to the top of the world
With big ambitions in India, the retail giant has recruited hundreds of small businesses to get packages to the most remote customers — including those 11,562 feet up in the Himalayas.
Humans should stop meddling with pandas and let them die
It may be an unpopular opinion, but hear it out.
A photographer’s quest to document the oldest trees around the world
Photographer Beth Moon has spent years tracking down some of the world’s oldest ancient trees.
How Instagram threads became the WikiHow for Gen Z
How does a Google-averse generation figure out how to deal with acne, fake friends, and boy trouble? On Instagram, of course.
Is the age-old quest for a baldness cure reaching its end?
From a new regenerative drug to a hair-transplanting robot: a trip on the frontiers of dealing with male-pattern baldness.
U.S. hunger for opioid alternative drives boom in Borneo jungle
Americans looking to relieve chronic pain or wean off painkillers have turned to kratom tree leaves, that Southeast Asian farmers have long chewed to relieve pain.
Can the wonderful octopus help make wheelchairs obsolete?
Powered trousers, electrified chainmail and artificial muscles inspired by octopuses are on the brink of creating a mobility revolution.
from Scraps
Sculptures by Lydia Ricci made from nothing but scraps.
Are we ready for robot sex?
Maybe they need to be more like us. Or maybe we’re already learning to be more like them.
We made plastic. We depend on it. Now, we’re drowning in it.
The miracle material has made modern life possible. But more than 40 percent of it is used just once, and it’s choking our waterways.
Dry, the beloved country
How the city of Cape Town has come together in the face of an extraordinary, once-in-300-years drought.
Inside Amazon’s fake review economy
A vast web of Amazon review fraud lives online, and it’s designed to evade the company’s efforts to thwart it.
The gambler who cracked the horse-racing code
Bill Benter did the impossible: Write an algorithm that couldn’t lose at the track. After winning a billion dollars, he tells his story for the first time.
The Great High School Impostor
When Artur Samarin arrived at a small-town Pennsylvania high school, he worked hard to fit in. And he did it well. So well that he pulled off one of the boldest hoaxes of our time.
The bike-share oversupply in China
Gigantic piles of impounded, abandoned, and broken bicycles have become a familiar sight in many Chinese cities, after a rush to build up its new bike-sharing industry vastly overreached.
Japan’s rent a family industry
People who are short on relatives can hire a husband, a mother, a grandson. The resulting relationships can be more real than you’d expect.
Google Glass 2.0 is a startling second act
Google Glass flopped. Then Alphabet realized that the future of wearables was in factories and warehouses. Welcome to Google Glass 2.0.
Watch this video of Obama–It’s the future of fake news
In a new paper from University of Washington, researchers demonstrate using neural networks to generate realistic-looking video footage of Obama. Is this the fake news of the future?
Ancient Romans made world’s ‘most durable’ concrete. We might use it to stop rising seas.
Scientists crack mystery of ancient Roman concrete’s 2,000-year life span.
The ‘coffin homes’ of Hong Kong
AP photographer Kin Cheung spent time recently photographing some of the tiny subdivided housing units in Hong Kong, known as “coffin homes.”
Inside China’s experiment to find friends for 230 million old people
China is home to a quarter of the world’s seniors, and it needs robots to care its large, and growing, elderly population.
This site sells un-branded food and household essentials–all for $3 or less
A San Francisco-based start-up is offering un-branded consumer products all at $3 a piece through online sales only.
People are now snorting chocolate to get high
Coco Loko, a “snortable” chocolate powder being marketed as a drug-free way to get a buzz.
The last death-defying honey hunter of Nepal
One man from the Kulung culture harvests psychotropic honey that is guarded by capricious spirits and the world’s largest honeybees.