Ruby Grierson stood in the middle of a slum house in Stepney, East London, her film-making equipment set up and ready to go. To the gutsy but dishevelled resident who lived there, she said, “The camera is yours. The microphone is yours. …

A small white yacht, at some distance, traced its line through the sea that separates Scotland from Ireland. Here on the Northern Irish shore, everything was still. The water was so calm that it merely rippled in a pattern of diamond-like shapes — miniature standing waves. It didn’t look real…

On 19 May 2014, I sat down at my desk for the first time as a full-time freelance journalist. …

Stand in a forest, no strangers near you, and you can feel as secure as ever you might, locked in the house. Or a bunker, if you have one. The trees stand too. Their tops may sway in the breeze, but that is all far above. …

They can help, but there are some things you need to know — Over the summer, the owners of Boedecker Cellars in Oregon could leave their doors open to let fresh air circulate while socially distanced customers enjoyed glasses of the company’s prize pinot noir. But now winter is coming. “We wanted to make sure that every table in here had coverage,” says…

The race is on to contain it while it’s still possible — The new border fences stretch for hundreds of kilometers. Helicopters and drones circle overhead, scanning for sick individuals while biological samples are ferried to labs for analysis. As fatalities mount, soldiers scour wide areas, searching for corpses. Sniffer dogs have been trained to locate the dead. This is not a…

Intensive care has risen to the challenge of 2020. Here’s what has changed. — This story is part of “Six Months In,” a special weeklong Elemental series reflecting on where we’ve been, what we’ve learned, and what the future holds for the Covid-19 pandemic. Matt Morgan, MD, an intensive care doctor at the University Hospital of Wales, in the United Kingdom, vividly remembers his…

A.I. researchers are turning to neuroscience to build smarter, more powerful neural networks — In 1998, an engineer in Sony’s computer science lab in Japan filmed a lost-looking robot moving trepidatiously around an enclosure. The robot was tasked with two objectives: avoid obstacles and find objects in the pen. …

It’s been a strange year so far, hasn’t it. Since at least late January, I had been aware of news stories about the new coronavirus then causing havoc in Wuhan. …