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Will Your Baby Like Cilantro? These Genetic Tests Say They Can Tell

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You have instant communication, on-demand entertainment, and dial-up transportation—why should you have to wait nine months to see what kind of baby you’re going to have? Now there’s an app for that. In a modern-day reboot of Lindsay Bluth’s “Mommy What Will I Look Like” business venture, Denver-based startup HumanCode has introduced BabyGlimpse. It’s a […]

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Leaving Neverland Forces Us to Confront Our Feral Fandom

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He was ours. And because he was ours I told myself I wouldn't watch it. I told myself that there was a chamber somewhere deep within, somewhere perhaps beyond reason and logic, that Michael Jackson inhabited. That I wanted to protect that place, that altar. That I needed to protect it. For myself. Because isn't […]

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Why So Many Fantasy Novels Are Obsessed With Academia

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The best fantasy debut of 2018 has a problem. It was also the best fantasy debut of 2009. And 2007. And 1997, 1985, 1982, and 1968. Authors change; the story stays the same. In the darkness a child is born. The child suffers, but he has mysterious power. Posthaste, destiny leads the child to the […]

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Scientists Discover Clean Water Ice Just Below Mars' Surface

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Locked away beneath the surface of Mars are vast quantities of water ice. But the properties of that ice—how pure it is, how deep it goes, what shape it takes—remain a mystery to planetary geologists. Those things matter to mission planners, too: Future visitors to Mars, be they short-term sojourners or long-term settlers, will need […]

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Brazil's Museum Fire Proves Cultural Memory Needs a Digital Backup

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Fire doesn’t heed history. It doesn’t care about posterity or culture or memory. Fire consumes everything and anything, even if that thing is the last of its kind. On Sunday night, it came for the National Museum of Brazil, burning for six hours and leaving behind ashes where there had been dinosaur fossils, the oldest […]

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Shatter, Batter, Wax: How Cannabis Extracts Come to Be

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Some time around the mid-aughts, folks in the weed industry began to notice a shift in the market. Pot smokers were smoking less, and dabbing more—heating the plant’s oily extracts to inhale high concentrations of hallmark marijuana molecules like THC. Extracts, which go by names including shatter, batter, wax, dabs, and honey, weren't just stronger […]

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Space Really Does Need Traffic Cops

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In the early Space Age, the people who sent up satellites could operate under what's known as "big sky" theory. Space is so vast, so spacious, that we could never possibly use it all up. History, however, has repeatedly shown that whenever we think something is too abundant for humans to deplete, we're wrong. And […]

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Silicon Valley's Immortalists Will Help Us All Stay Healthy

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In early 1954, Pope Pius XII summoned a venerable Swiss quack named Paul Niehans to the papal retreat at Castel Gandolfo. The pontiff was nauseated with gastritis, fatigued by his 77 years, and loath to meet his maker. So he had Niehans administer an anti­aging treatment called cell therapy, which would become sought after by […]