10 stories to read this weekend • Issue 257 • December 14, 2018
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The Race to Understand Antarctica’s Most Terrifying Glacier (Wired)
Thwaites has long been the subject of dark speculation. If this mysterious glacier were to “go bad”—glaciologist-speak for the process by which a glacier breaks down into icebergs and eventually collapses into the ocean—it might be more than a scientific curiosity. Indeed, it might be the kind of event that changes the course of civilization.
Also see: An Upheaval at the Ends of the World
Susan Potter gave her body to science. Her cadaver became immortal. (National Geographic Magazine)
Susan Potter donated her body to science. It was frozen, sawed into four blocks, sliced 27,000 times, and photographed after each cut. The result: a virtual cadaver that will speak to medical students from the grave. National Geographic has been documenting Potter’s journey for 16 years.
How personalized medicine is transforming your health care (National Geographic Magazine)
Stunning advances in gene research and data mining will predict diseases and devise treatments tailored to each of us.
How the brain’s face code might unlock the mysteries of perception (Nature)
Doris Tsao mastered facial recognition in the brain. Now she’s looking to determine the neural code for everything we see.
The Mass Extinction Detectives (Methods - Science Friday)
No one knows how the dinosaurs rose to dominate the planet. But the answers may lie within a mysterious mass extinction that wiped out their competition.
Rise of the Colossus, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world (History Magazine - National Geographic)
Standing for a little more than 50 years in the third century B.C., Rhodes’s titanic statue of Helios made a colossal impact on Western art, history, and imagination.
The Next Great Chess Boom Is Here (The Ringer)
The unpredictable champion Magnus Carlsen and a YouTube-trained, Twitch-streaming generation of young fans has revived one of our oldest games. Is the next great chess boom here?
The Case of Agatha Christie (London Review of Books)
Her great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate. She believed in evil, not necessarily in a theological sense – that’s a topic she doesn’t explore – but as a plain fact about human beings and their actions. She isn’t much interested in the ethics or metaphysics of why people do the bad things they do. But she is unflinchingly willing to look directly at the truth that they do them.
Kelly Slater’s Shock Wave (The New Yorker)
The best surfer in history made a machine that creates perfect conditions on demand. Will his invention democratize surfing or despoil it?
A Tragedy in Yemen, Made in America (The New York Times Magazine)
Tracing an airstrike halfway around the world back to an American bomb factory.
Note: “10 stories to read this weekend” is a weekly feature of this blog. New issues are published every Friday at 22:00 IST / 16:30 GMT