The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of (via Digg) 

For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself.

It’ll Take an Army to Kill the Emperor 

The men and women who are trying to bring down cancer are starting to join forces rather than work alone. Together, they are winning a few of the battles against the world’s fiercest disease. For this unprecedented special report, we visited elite cancer research centers around the United States of America to find out where we are in the war.

Also See: How to Fight Cancer (When Cancer Fights Back), where Ed Long does a splendid job of explaining why there’s no cure for cancer yet. I had linked to this piece in Issue 173.

This Is the Best Dinosaur Fossil of Its Kind Ever Found 

Some 110 million years ago, this armored plant-eater, known as a nodosaur, lumbered through what is now western Canada, until a flooded river swept it into open sea. The dinosaur’s undersea burial preserved its armor in exquisite detail. Its skull still bears tile-like plates and a gray patina of fossilized skins.

When Your Child Is a Psychopath 

The condition has long been considered untreatable. Experts can spot it in a child as young as 3 or 4. But a new clinical approach offers hope.

More Is More 

Even if you think yourself a reluctant shopper, consider all of the resources used to create our material world: the steel to build our homes, the natural gas to fire our furnaces, the aluminium in our smartphones and tablets. In the world’s richest countries, consumption has ballooned by over a third in the past few decades to the point that in 2010, each person in the thirty-four richest nations consumed over 220 pounds of stuff every day. How did we come to be such voracious, irrepressible consumers? And how has all of this consuming changed the world?

The Political Arctic - How a Melting Arctic Changes Everything 

Why Vladimir Putin thinks the North Pole belongs to Russia. 

Also see Part One of the “How a melting Arctic changes everything” series.

Dubai oil free future 

Oil won’t last forever, and Dubai’s government knows it. To stay prosperous, the city-state bets big on science and tech.

Reef Avengers 

Indonesia’s reefs have been poisoned or blasted to smithereens by the very people who depend on them the most. Now islanders are working to restore the coral, and recover the resources they’ve lost, piece by piece.

How the Syrian government brought soccer into campaign of oppression 

Backed by FIFA’s tacit support, Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria has woven soccer into its grisly campaign of oppression, tearing apart a generation of players.

Thomas Cook and the Stack Pirates (via Longreads)  

Boredom and an enterprising Brit gave birth to the modern tourism industry, and we’re still trying to make sense of it all.

Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a marquee feature of this blog. New editions are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT