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What Gets Buried in a Small Town: The Toxic Legacy of PCBs in Bloomington
The PCB story in Bloomington remains compelling in its specificity; yet, it also serves as a representative anecdote for the impact of modern industrial and chemical revolutions on the U.S. landscape.

Subterranean Paris: Félix Nadar’s Descent Into the Parisian Underground
An excerpt from the celebrated 19th-century photographer's memoir "When I Was a Photographer."

Superfoods of the Future, From Cockroach Milk to DNA-Personalized Meals
While the meal in a pill remains a dream of science fiction, new and intriguing ideas continue to emerge.

On Karel Čapek’s Prophetic Science Fiction Novel ‘War With the Newts’
The Czech writer’s darkly humorous novel, published in 1936, anticipated our current reality with eerie accuracy.
Spotlight: Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Manitoba. He is the author of forty books, including New York Times bestseller How the World Really Works and Energy and Civilization, published by the MIT Press. In 2010 he was named by Foreign Policy as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers. Bill Gates says, “there is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.”
With the publication of his latest and most readable book, Invention and Innovation, Smil offers an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention.