Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Oyster reefs are being restored as breakwaters and promoted as carbon sinks. Cores from 25 reefs in North Carolina show they grow with sea level, and that the shells they build give back the carbon they bury.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change

Literary modernism is an artistic movement that praises formal deviance more than any movement before it.

Literary critics rarely call a sentence bad, and they have learned to prize the moments where grammar, plot or realism break down. This thread traces that habit back to modernism, when breaking rules became a program. Not every broken rule, it argues, is a deliberate one.

Bad Writing in the Modernist Novel

Life is what you can get away with, and so is making a record.

Most jazz records are photographs of a good live take. This one was built instead, layered, cut apart and reversed in the studio, and that is a different art rather than a better or worse version of the same one.

Sing the Color Blue

Roman-period mourners used cattail fluff bedding to make graves resemble places of rest

Archaeologists notice what survives: brooches, cups, beads. Four graves in northern Poland kept something softer, and it changes the picture of a richly furnished burial.

Pillows, mattresses or log coffin linings: Use of cattail (Typha sp.) in Roman period funerary rituals at Czarnówko in Pomerania

One of the book’s discoveries is the simple realization that experience has a history at all.

What is experience, exactly? The question has rarely been asked, and one answer is that experience has a history: it has not always been possible, and it has changed over time. Literature, art, music and philosophy trace that history, which ends in memoir.

Experience: A History

The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform

One method to right the wrongs was to guide children in camera use to inspire them to shoot back.

In 1970s south London, a children's rights workshop handed kids cameras built from wellies, prams and chocolate tins. The aim was to let them shoot back at the images that defined them, and to show that independence learned in a makeshift darkroom could carry into social and political life.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

Priya’s experience reveals one of the costs the diversity contract imposes on residents of color.

A woman started seeing therapists — not over a crisis, but because she needed somewhere she was permitted to talk about race at all. She came to each interview with a list on her phone of incidents she had never been able to name out loud. Her case is unusually intense, which is exactly what makes an entire community's unspoken rules visible.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb