Burkhard Bilger

What can elephants, birds, and flamenco players teach a neuroscientist-composer about music?

Building 500, as this facility was formerly known, has the looming hulk of an Egyptian temple: it was once the largest man-made structure in Colorado. When it opened, in 1941, four days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, threats to American safety were much on the government’s mind. (After the war, President Eisenhower spent seven weeks on the eighth floor, recuperating from a heart attack.) The Good Tastes Study, as the baby experiment is called, is in a similar spirit. The two electrodes on th…

Bull riding is the most dangerous organized sport in the world, but some kids can’t wait to compete.

In Mexico, spelunkers are exploring what might be the deepest cave in the world.

The Google car knows every turn. It never gets drowsy or distracted, or wonders who has the right-of-way. But not everyone finds the technology appealing.

A hip-hop pioneer reinvents late-night music.

A new era of strength competitions tests the limits of the human body.

“It used to be much wetter here when I was a boy,” Hamad Reesi said, as our S.U.V. lurched up a gravel switchback in the foothills. “You never had to buy fodder for your goats.” Ali al-Abdullatif nodded, then yanked the steering wheel to one side to avoid a dropoff. Next to him, Pieter Hoff dozed in the passenger seat. Abdullatif is the chairman of the Horticultural Association of Oman, a slender, cultivated man more comfortable potting plants than going on desert excursions. Hoff is a Dutch inv…

What a brush with death taught David Eagleman about the mysteries of time and the brain.

New York was once the tugboat capital of the world, with more than eight hundred boats crisscrossing its harbor in the nineteen-thirties. The McAllisters were part of the so-called Irish Navy, with its patchy fleets of steamboats, diesel tugs, coal barges, and smaller fry, schooling on what was once known as the porgy grounds, around the Whitehall Ferry Terminal. The boats were manned by brothers, uncles, cousins, and more distant kin, their blood ties a bond against the petty thieves and extort…