How much more can we extend lifespans?

Whereas other plants have a single most useful element, such as the grains of wheat or the fruit of tomatoes, wild cabbage has many.

Listen to Two is already too many by Phoebe Arslanagic-Little

The USA has nuclear power due to the efforts of one man: Admiral Hyman Rickover.

The Soviet Union had optimistic economists too. Their failure can help today’s reformers to avoid the same fate.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but it’s also one of medicine’s biggest success stories.

How Africa Works by Joe Studwell is the sequel to one of the most influential books written on development in recent decades.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.

How Europe's labor laws cause its companies to fall behind.

Episode 12 of of the Works in Progress podcast is about how inflation undermines state capacity.

The secrets to extending human lifespans might lie in the animals that can already live for centuries.

Could ours do the same?

Episode eleven of the Works in Progress Podcast has some radioactive hot takes

Clean drinking water is a modern miracle. But it has become expensive, and it doesn’t need to be.

Removing them can turn a service people tolerate into one they’re happy to use.

The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

Long before modern science, Europeans learned to see their own time as an age of invention rather than decline.

Some of the Works in Progress essays that I enjoyed the most this year.

Hepatitis B is a tiny virus that causes hundreds of thousands of deaths from liver disease and cancer each year. The vaccine against it became the first of many milestones.

Did the Greeks and Romans have bad taste or have the reconstructors of classical statues been trolling us all this time?

It's not because of shorter sentences

Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate.

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Quartz helped Japan’s watchmakers nearly drive Switzerland’s watch industry out of business. But the Swiss fought back.

A new measure may be the holy grail of economic regulation.

Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to use them.

The early smallpox vaccines that kept dying out, why Émile Roux drilled into rabbits' skulls, and the lucky career changes that saved millions of lives.

In the space of a few decades, nearly every city in the Western world banned densification. What happened?

Plus: Why cities in poor countries need wider streets, how to measure competition, and the South Korean baby bust.

Episode ten of the Works in Progress podcast is surprisingly NIMBY.

If we ever want to live in space, we need to work out a way of creating artificial gravity.

For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

The amount of housework a married American woman did fell by 48 percent in 45 years. The dishwasher alone didn't cause this, but it certainly helped.

Roads are the arteries of cities, making the whole more than the sum of its parts. Cities of the developing world need more of them.

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Episode nine of the Works in Progress podcast.

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

Our first print edition ships in two weeks.

Some say AI will solve medicine within a decade. Others believe biology is far more complex than people imagine and AI will hit the limits of clinical trials and economics. Who's right?

Episode eight of the Works in Progress podcast is about the politics of the Abundance movement

The greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who can take a fresh perspective

Scientists are using AI to hallucinate novel proteins that could transform medicine, agriculture, and materials science

His Nobel is a triumph for history and the importance of ideas

Could desalination make them irrelevant?

Safer transplants, new antibiotics, the rise of paper mills, long-term flu protection, slowing down ageing, and more.

Episode four of Hard Drugs is about building new proteins

If antibodies were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.

Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne diseases as rare as those carried by water.

Plus: How to make antibodies, why rivers are now battlefields, and a clinical trial for cooling the plant