Stunning Videos of Evolution in Action The MEGA-plate allows scientists to watch bacteria adapting to antibiotics before their eyes. You’ve undoubtedly seen this plot before: a cast of characters gets slowly whittled down over the course of a quest, in which increasingly difficult challenges compels the protagonists to acquire new skills. A familiar story, but you’ve never seen it play out in a movie quite like this. The cast members are bacteria. Their set is a large acrylic dish, four feet wide and two across. It is filled with a nutritious agar jelly that contains varying amounts of an antibiotic. The outermost sections are free of the drug—a safe zone in which microbes can easily grow. But as they move towards the dish’s centre, the concentration of antibiotic goes up in 10-fold increments, and conditions become increasingly deadly. To survive in these toxic zones, they need to evolve resistance. Mladen Antonov / Getty Flat-Earthers Have a Wild New Theory About Forests

What it means to believe that “real” trees no longer exist. Something tremendous is happening; over the last few weeks, without too many of its globe-headed detractors noticing, a surprisingly vast community on the tattered fringes of intellectual orthodoxy is in turmoil. A bizarre new theory has turned the flat earth upside down. The flat earth is still flat, but now it’s dotted with tiny imitations of the truly enormous trees that once covered the continents, and which in our deforested age we can hardly even remember.Where To Buy Grow Lights In Ontario I’ve always been mildly obsessed with the flat-earth truth movement, the sprawling network of people utterly convinced that the world has been lied to for centuries about its own physical shape. Lace Wedding Dress With Detachable Train

The particulars differ, but here everyone takes it as a given that a conspiracy reaching from your first schoolteacher to NASA to the metaphysical Beyond has deluded humanity, making us believe that we’re nothing more than something that grew on a rock, a layer of biological grease mouldering on the surface of a ball suspended in empty space, when we’re actually living on a flat plane. Ted S. Warren / APBest Cat Litter Furniture What It Feels Like to Die Science is just beginning to understand the experience of life’s end. “Do you want to know what will happen as your body starts shutting down?” My mother and I sat across from the hospice nurse in my parents’ Colorado home. It was 2005, and my mother had reached the end of treatments for metastatic breast cancer. A month or two earlier, she’d been able to take the dog for daily walks in the mountains and travel to Australia with my father.

Now, she was weak, exhausted from the disease and chemotherapy and pain medication. My mother had been the one to decide, with her doctor’s blessing, to stop pursuing the dwindling chemo options, and she had been the one to ask her doctor to call hospice. Still,  we weren’t prepared for the nurse’s question. My mother and I exchanged glances, a little shocked. But what we felt most was a sense of relief. Jae C. Hong / AP A Less Lonely Way to Lose Your Faith Members of Oasis, a group in the Bible Belt, find community and acceptance in religious-like services. Where do nonreligious people go to find community? Some might join a sports league or a film society or attend a local atheist meet-up. Some might hang out online. But in certain parts of the country, some might join Oasis, a community of humanists, agnostics, atheists, self-identified freethinkers, and even questioning theists. Oasis members see their fellowship as guided by values that emphasize people’s common humanity, the first being that “people are more important than beliefs.”

Oasis started in the summer of 2012, when Mike Aus, a former pastor, began meeting with friends in Houston who, like him, shared an aversion to religious dogma, but were drawn to the social benefits of organized religious life. They wanted the solidarity of meeting with like-minded people. They wanted to gather weekly “to hear good music and thought-provoking talks.” Moreover, they wanted to be part of a community in which being secular wasn’t a bad thing: less of an absence or “loss” than a positive outlook on life. They had no grand plans to start a movement, the 52-year-old Aus told me recently. What they had was a collective sense of need.Alex Wong / Getty Fear of a Female President Hillary Clinton’s candidacy has provoked a wave of misogyny—one that may roil American life for years to come. Except for her gender, Hillary Clinton is a highly conventional presidential candidate. She’s been in public life for decades. Her rhetoric is carefully calibrated.

She tailors her views to reflect the mainstream within her party. The reaction to her candidacy, however, has been unconventional. The percentage of Americans who hold a “strongly unfavorable” view of her substantially exceeds the percentage for any other Democratic nominee since 1980, when pollsters began asking the question. Antipathy to her among white men is even more unprecedented. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 52 percent of white men hold a “very unfavorable” view of Clinton. That’s a whopping 20 points higher than the percentage who viewed Barack Obama very unfavorably in 2012, 32 points higher than the percentage who viewed Obama very unfavorably in 2008, and 28 points higher than the percentage who viewed John Kerry very unfavorably in 2004. Brian Snyder / Reuters An 'Overheated' Hillary Clinton Departs a 9/11 Commemoration The candidate’s doctor said she was suffering from pneumonia after suddenly leaving the ceremony. Hillary Clinton has been diagnosed with pneumonia, her doctor said Sunday after her sudden departure from a memorial ceremony at Ground Zero sparked a frenzy of speculation about her health.

“Secretary Clinton has been experiencing a cough related to allergies,” said Lisa Bardack, Clinton’s physician, in a statement. “On Friday, during follow up evaluation of her prolonged cough, she was diagnosed with pneumonia. She was put on antibiotics, and advised to rest and modify her schedule. While at this morning’s event, she became overheated and dehydrated. I have just examined her and she is now rehydrated and recovering nicely.” The Democratic presidential nominee left early during a ceremony in New York to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks because she felt “overheated,” her campaign said Sunday. Is America Any Safer? Since 9/11, the United States has spent $1 trillion to defend against al-Qaeda and ISIL, dirty bombs and lone wolves, bioterror and cyberterror. Fifteen years ago this September 11, 19 terrorists, using four jetliners as guided missiles, killed 2,977 people—and enveloped the country in fear.

It was the first sustained attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which was a far-off military base. This massacre hit the center of our government and blasted away part of our most iconic skyline. It left a stench that New Yorkers could smell weeks later as remains continued to be recovered from the ashes. Suddenly, we were vulnerable. Not just to disease, tornadoes, accidents, or criminals, but to the kinds of enemies that had always threatened others but never us. Barack Obama remembers that after the second plane hit, he left the Chicago building that housed his state-Senate office. “I stood in the street and looked up at the Sears Tower, fearing it might be a target, too,” he told me in a recent email exchange, adding, “I remember rocking Sasha to sleep that night, wondering what kind of world our daughters were going to grow up in.” He continued, “With nearly 3,000 people killed in the places where we lived our daily lives, there was a feeling that our homeland was truly vulnerable for the first time.”