A 2010 DEA operation in Dallas produced a rare prize: the trackable phone PINs of two kingpins of Los Zetas, a Mexican drug cartel. Then, the agency handed the intelligence to a Mexican police unit long known for leaks. Within weeks, cartel gunmen swept through Allende, a ranching town near the Texas border, burning homes and kidnapping dozens, possibly hundreds. ProPublica reconstructed the slaughter through the voices of victims' families, cartel operatives, and the agent who led the case. Most of the dead had no tie to the drug trade, but the DEA never investigated. It still insists it has no blood on its hands.
Lyme cases have more than doubled since 2000, and scientists have named eight new tick-borne diseases in the same span. The ticks are winning. Sarah Zhang talked to researchers who have stopped hiking their own neighborhoods and now want tick control on the scale of the mosquito campaigns that once wiped malaria from the United States. Their favored target is the deer. One epidemiologist called himself the nation's biggest advocate for killing them, since a single deer can feed enough ticks to spawn three million offspring a season.
Researchers set out to kill nearly all of the 5,300 American elms in a Vermont grove, injecting each one with the fungus behind Dutch elm disease. The point was to see which few survived. Tik Root followed the crews as they drilled inch-deep holes and injected 100,000 spores into tree after tree, marking each with a dab of orange paint. Dutch elm disease has killed tens of millions of elms and made the species endangered. The survivors could seed the largest disease-tolerant elm population in a century. Whether any of these trees make it will take years to learn.
The sound of an earthworm eating resembles soft Velcro pulling apart, captured by a microphone buried in Oxfordshire soil. Ella Browning, who once studied bat echolocation, turned her recorders downward into a soundscape almost no one had listened to before. Earthworms have no mouth, no ears, and no deliberate sound. Their burrowing and munching give them away anyway. Browning found that soil grew noisiest after midnight, and that rewilded ground hummed with more variety than grazed cattle pasture. A noisier soil, the theory holds, is a healthier one. What the strangest underground sounds belong to, no one yet knows.
Further reading: Claire E Schultz shares her 'No worm left behind' motto as she works to save stranded earthworms from the baking sun. "Any action can seem futile amid so much suffering. I've realised the important thing is to stop despairing and do something." Read more →
