There is a specific kind of exhaustion that a good night's sleep doesn’t fix. You can feel it in the grocery store aisles when you're stressing over the prices. You can feel it in the gridlock of your morning commute, and you can certainly feel it in the background radiation of your social media notifications. It doesn’t matter if you’re pulling a double shift just to make rent or sitting in a corner office insulated by a heavy stock portfolio. There is a persistent, undenia

In the early 1990s, out in the middle of the Arizona desert, a group of scientists built the most ambitious, meticulously engineered terrarium in human history. It was called Biosphere 2. The goal was to create a perfectly closed, self-sustaining ecological system. They built an ocean with a coral reef, a mangrove wetland, a Savannah grassland, and a rain forest, all encased inside a massive geodesic dome of glass and steel. They controlled the climate down to the decimal poi

If you want to understand what is happening to the modern human mind, it will help to look at what happens to a human body when you shoot it into space. When astronauts leave Earth's atmosphere, they enter an environment of zero gravity. For the first few days, I imagine it feels like an absolute miracle. You can float effortlessly from one end of the station to the other. There is no heavy lifting. There is no bodily resistance. It is the ultimate, weightless freedom from th