All Stories by Matt Crenson
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Science & SocietyTop 25 stories of 2013, from microbes to meteorites
This year, careful readers may have noticed a steady accumulation of revelations about the bacterial communities that call the human body home.
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HumansWhat ancient mummies have to tell us about the perils of modern life
Once you hit a certain age, visiting a doctor is basically a guilt trip. All that satisfying stuff you eat, drink or smoke is killing you, a white-coated overachiever tells you. You need to exercise and lose weight, or the grim reaper will be at your door long before you’re ready. And it will all […]
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Humans
STS finalists bound for Washington
Forty vie for top awards in 2013 Intel Science Talent Search.
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New research on Native American origins takes anthropologists down memory lane
In school we learn that science proceeds logically from one experiment to the next, leaving in its wake a complete and certain body of knowledge. But science isn’t like that. It twists and turns, careens and tumbles and gets stuck in deep, sticky mudholes. And sometimes, science backtracks. That’s happened in cosmology recently, as observations […]
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Too smart to fail: Why people think they’re so great
A lot of the world’s biggest problems are what you might call crises of overconfidence. Big, powerful nations conquer small, unstable ones expecting that invading troops will be greeted as liberators. On Wall Street, people who should know better buy dubious investments under the assumption that they’ll be able to unload them before the bubble […]
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Tools tell a more complicated tale of the origin of the human genus
The first animals that could arguably be called “human” made the evolutionary scene a little less than 2 million years ago. These aren’t folks you’d mistake for modern-day Homo sapiens, or even the GEICO caveman. But they were clearly distinct from their more apelike predecessors. They had bigger brains, for one thing, and walked fully […]