Explore the Human Science section of The Pulse for insights into human biology, behavior and adaptation in a changing world.
The water at the top of the world sat at about 29 degrees Fahrenheit, below the freezing point of fresh water. A maritime lawyer stood at…
Two men carried a bunk bed, a table and a stack of lanterns into a limestone room with no windows at all. It sat deep under…
Along a bramble hedge on a warm English afternoon, the scene looks like a familiar summer idyll — insects drifting between flowers, gathering nectar. Watch closely,…
A hand coated white with chalk closes around a small plastic knob bolted to a climbing wall. Wires run from the forearm to a machine recording…
The line went down into darkness until it disappeared. A single diver followed it, fins first, into water with no bottom in sight. Minutes later he…
A recliner chair sat bolted inside a steel gondola at the tip of a spinning arm. Outside, a concrete hall shook faintly with the hum of…
A bare hand waits at one end of a glass tube shaped like the letter Y. The volunteer’s other hand is sealed inside a nitrile glove.…
A climber stands on a wind scoured ridge at 29,032 feet, breathing air with barely a third the oxygen of sea level. He clips into a…
A steel cylinder sits tilted on a ledge of rock, 205 feet down, where sunlight barely reaches. Inside, a man presses a handset to his ear.…
A young research assistant grips a pull up bar in a university gym. He finishes a set and his arms are already shaking. Someone fits a…
A dirt track in the Arizona desert, a wasp the length of a thumb joint working the ground with orange wings. A man kneels and lets…
A tray of watery potatoes, turnips and bread sits on a scale before it ever reaches a plate. Young men line up anyway. They have volunteered…
A runner’s heel hits the sand again and again, mile after mile, for a week straight. Long before the legs give out, the skin does. Race…
A fisherman slips off a bamboo platform into warm green water and does not come back up for minutes. He carries no tank, only a wooden…
A steel tank hisses in a London laboratory. Inside it, the air is thick enough to feel. A researcher watches an animal come out, looking for…
A sample of vanilla sits under a stranger’s nose. The room is ordinary, carpeted, still. But the headset strapped over their eyes says otherwise. Inside the…
A man lay on his back on the floor of a hotel pool in Croatia, perfectly still, for nearly half an hour. Nobody touched him. He…
A lantern hisses on a wooden table stacked with ticking instruments. Two cots sit against damp limestone, blankets rumpled, a wash basin on a stand. No…
A hiccup hits and the hands start moving on instinct. A paper bag gets crumpled open. A tongue gets pulled, a breath gets held, a spoonful…
The lake outside Wroclaw is a flooded quarry pit. In midwinter its water sits a few degrees above freezing. He waded in wearing nothing but a…
A nurse unlocked a supply closet one quiet afternoon in a small German hospital. She believed she was about to become the patient herself. Instead the…
A padded swing creaks back and forth in a research room, and a volunteer’s stomach already feels the dip. Headphones sit over both ears before the…
The entrance closed behind them in mid-March, and the daylight vanished. No watches. No phones. No windows. No way at all to feel the hours pass.…
The boat had moved on before he surfaced. A strong current caught the diver the moment he came up, and open water widened between him and…
A hum filled the room and the light went flat. The cot was comfortable, the goggles let in light but no shape, and cardboard tubes on…
Volunteers walked into a steel decompression chamber in Natick, Massachusetts, and the door was sealed behind them. Every day, a pump drew out a little more…
A clock in Vienna once stopped at 1:59:40, and the mark went into no record book. About six and a half years later, a runner crossed…
The tank is filled with thermoneutral water. An elastic sheet of waterproof fabric stretches across the surface, and a man lies down on it before being…
Bronze armor looted from Crete in 1964 spent sixty years at the Met before returning home Two bronze helmets and three abdominal guards, forged in the…
The plan was a short fast, then a return to ordinary meals. What actually happened took far longer to explain. A young man from Tayport, Scotland,…
The lamp was the only light, 440 feet from the entrance of a Texas cave. No clocks. No sunlight. No way to know whether a minute…
A tent glowed faintly orange in the absolute dark of Midnight Cave, in southern Texas. A French speleologist had climbed down into the limestone chamber carrying…
He crossed the line in Malaga in early May, chest heaving, arms still pumping. The race was a national masters championship. He had just run 31…
The bed was level enough to lie in, but the head end was fixed six degrees lower than the feet. Healthy volunteers climbed in and stayed…
Tutankhamun’s tomb may hide 100 feet of sealed corridors and chambers For over a century, Tutankhamun’s tomb has been one of archaeology’s most examined sites. And…
The stream was still frozen on a May afternoon in the mountains above Narvik, Norway. A skier fell onto it, the ice broke, and she went…
The pool in Asker, Norway sat perfectly still above him. Below the surface, a 60 year old man was walking. Not swimming, not gliding. Walking on…
The room was barely bigger than a closet, and it paid better than most campus jobs. A bed, a U shaped foam pillow around both ears,…
Six people walked into a windowless cluster of metal rooms in Moscow and did not come back out for four months. The modules were sealed tight,…
At 09:13 on a morning in early August, a set of heavy double doors swung open in Cologne. Six people stepped back into a world that…
The track was roughly 3,550 feet of steel rail laid straight across the New Mexico desert floor. On a clear December morning, nine solid fuel rockets…
The bed was tilted six degrees, head lower than the feet, and it stayed that way. The room was inside a sealed research facility in Cologne,…
Altitude tables describe an atmosphere that does not quite exist. They assume air thins at the same rate everywhere on the planet, so a given height…
The assumption behind almost every isolated habitat design is that people need each other. Common rooms get built large, tables get placed where crews will pass…
A bare room at a Dutch university hospital, a steel tub, and a man sitting in it up to the shoulders. The tub is packed with…
There is no organ in the body that keeps time. There is a cluster of cells in the brain that runs a cycle, but the cycle…
A bed, a table, a chair, an exercise bike. A kitchenette, a bathroom through the far wall. No window. No radio. No newspaper. No clock, and no…
A chasm in the Alps on the border between France and Italy, a rope dropping away into the dark. About 425 feet down, the shaft opens…
For most of the last century the physiology said this was impossible. The argument was simple and it looked sound. Lungs hold a fixed volume of…
Somewhere off the coast of Sulawesi, a diver tips forward over the side of a wooden boat. No tank, no wetsuit. Just a carved wooden mask,…
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