Will Holograms Help Us Grieve?

Ready or Not, Digital Afterlives Are Here to Stay

Long before Kim Kardashian West made headlines for being gifted a hologram of her deceased father for her 40th birthday, a panel session at South by Southwest Interactive, an annual conference for tech innovators, predicted innovations like this as inevitable. As the panel’s program text read: “Grandma passed away last year, but she’s coming back for Thanksgiving dinner this year. This may sound like a horror story,” it continued, “but it could be the future of family reunions.”

The 2015 conversation, titled “HoloGramma: How Tech Can ‘Bring Back’ Our Departed,” discussed …

by Thomas Conner | November 23, 2020

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Why CRISPR May Be the Most Important Thing to Happen on the Planet in 4.5 Billion Years

This Gene-Editing Technology Promises to Revolutionize Medicine, Spark Ethical Debate, and Might Even Bring Woolly Mammoths Back to Earth

by Frederic C. Rich | November 19, 2020

Bringing extinct species back to life may sound like science fiction, but it’s a real thing—perhaps the most important to occur during the past 4.5 billion years. Called “de-extinction,” the …

How a Royal Illness Spurred a Public Health Revolution

For Decades, the British Ignored One of the Greatest Health Calamities of Their Age. Then the Prince of Wales Contracted Typhoid Fever

by Jacob Steere-Williams | November 16, 2020

In the early hours of Friday, October 9, President Donald Trump announced that he, like nearly 8 million other Americans in the past eight months, had tested positive for COVID-19. …

Understanding the History of Fire Can Help Us Fight Today’s Biggest Blazes

Lessons From the Past and Warnings for the Future in 400 Million Years of Geological Record

by Andrew C. Scott | November 12, 2020

Charcoal fragments are black, often small, and generally unremarkable. Most people would not realize it if they were to come across one. But over the past 40 years or so, …

The Navy Gave a Gay Man a Home—And a ‘Bad Paper’ Discharge That Haunted Him for Decades

A Vietnam War Veteran Reflects on 50 Years of Fighting for People Like Himself and The Group He Loved

by Dave Lara | November 11, 2020

I was 17 when I joined the Navy in 1965. My family was poor, and I was failing out of high school. Four years in the Navy felt like my …

Is a Secret Ancient Language of Wanderers a Harbinger of Our Future?

The European Travelers’ Tongue Rotwelsch—Which Gave Us the Phrase ‘in a Pickle’—Has United Outcasts for Centuries

by Martin Puchner | November 9, 2020

Have you ever been “in a pickle”?

Then you have encountered Rotwelsch, an ancient language of the road, spoken by vagrants and refugees, merchants and thieves since the European Middle …

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