Resources for Technical Writing Students (ENGR 231/ENGL 235): Articles for Reading Journals

From The Atlantic: The idea that animals are conscious, long unpopular in the West, has lately found favor among scientists who study animal cognition. Now even some insects are thought to have interior lives. A journey into the depths of the animal mind. (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

From Wired: When Sonia Vallabh discovered what killed her mother at 52, she and her husband began a tireless crusade to find a cure.

From California Sunday Magazine: For the past 148 years, Yosemite’s Lyell Glacier has taught us about the Earth — how it was created, where it was going, and now, how it might end.

From Quanta Magazine: The stunning emergence of a new type of superconductivity with the mere twist of a carbon sheet has left physicists giddy, and its discoverer nearly overwhelmed.

From The New Yorker: The new race to the moon, for science, profit, and pride.

From The Atlantic: For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake.

From The New Yorker: Can the infirmities of aging be postponed?

From Wired: For ages, the sense of smell has been underestimated and poorly understood. Now scientists are trying to crack the code of how it works - and create robots that can sniff out the world's secrets like a dog.

In the Martian landscape that is the Atacama desert, astrobiologists are learning how to recognize extraterrestrial organisms.

How science and myth collide in water.

Jams emerge from an elemental struggle between the natural and the mechanical.

Fossil remnants of the Devonian period in modern-day New York.

On the banks of California's Russian River, a cold war has erupted among neighbors and boaters over private beach access.

Physicists who have revived experiments from 50 years ago say nerve cells communicate with mechanical pulses.

How do we relate to landscapes?

On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.

New research is zeroing in on a biochemical basis for the placebo effect

After 17 years, researchers finally unlock the mysteries of Sumatran rhino reproduction

How the new astronomy obscured the traditional night sky

Neonatal medicine tries to save a baby born at 24 weeks

Forest fire in Oregon

We are on the brink of being able to genetically engineer an extinction. Should we?

Mass extinction of insect species (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

The space race killed the sparrow. Of course, there were other factors.

Geological features, toxic fumes, and visions of the future.

Endangered North Atlantic Right Whales

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable.

A trans woman finds the surgery she needs to just be herself.

A healthcare nightmare.

Fred Berlin has done decades of pioneering research on pedophilia — and outraged a lot of people along the way

For the men and women who use the Deep Space Network to talk to the heavens, failure is not an option.

Why are black mothers and babies in the United States dying at more than double the rate of white mothers and babies? The answer has everything to do with the lived experience of being a black woman in America.

The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.

Patients too often undergo duplicate procedures — or fail to get them at all — because their medical history is incomplete. Why?

Research labs and field sites are swarming with men who sexually harass and assault their colleagues. But when women come forward, the perpetrators aren’t punished—the victims are.

In Siberia, a plan is under way to repopulate the grasslands with ancient grazers, including, in the near future, genetically engineered woolly mammoths. (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

In 2017, astronomers answered multiple major questions that have dominated their field for a generation.

Silicon Valley reinvents the breast pump.

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope verified the biggest batch of Earth-sized planets ever detected around a single star.

Precision medicine or what is cancer, though, really?

The emerging field of space archaeology

Solar eclipse of August 21, 2017

Inside the dangerous and unpredictable behavior of wildfire. (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

Psychopathy has long been considered untreatable. But a new clinical approach offers hope. (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

Inspired by new research on "facing your fears" as a cure for PTSD and phobias, I set out to see whether climbing a mountain could cure my fear of heights.

An ambitious new initiative to beam messages into space may be our best shot yet at learning whether we're alone in the universe. (HINT: click the Full Text PDF tab to see the version with images)

Wrestling with one's humanity as an animal medical researcher

What arboreal secrets are hidden in the canopies of ordinary trees?

A life of hunting and gathering had advantages over one of farming and settlement.

Career employees at the agency say political appointees are shutting them out of decision-making. They worry that the public will suffer.

The extinction crisis extends far beyond rare and endangered species.

Will a tumor spread? That may depend as much on your body as on your cancer.

President Obama outlines the four reasons that make him believe the trend toward clean energy is irreversible.

Good environmental intentions are swamped by the effects of money.

A philosopher's quest to understand the making of the mind.

They may not exist, but they tell us a lot about the human mind.

When a creature mysteriously turns up dead in Alaska, veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek gets the call. Her necropsies reveal cause of death and causes for concern as climate change frees up new pathogens and other dangers in a vast, thawing north.

The longest-running study of predator-prey dynamics in history, what it means to eat and be eaten, and how the battle to survive shapes the land.

An unexpected rain of spiders led to a lovely Twitter geek-out between astronomers and arachnologists.