Innholdsfortegnelse for 02/23/2018 i Newsweek International

JAMES MATTIS HAS SPENT THE PAST FEW months traveling the globe with Grant, Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. His heavily dog-eared copy details the mutual respect and affection shared between Grant, the top U.S. military leader during the Civil War, and his boss, President Abraham Lincoln. While Grant publicly supported Lincoln, Mattis, the secretary of defense, has been noticeably quiet about his president, Donald Trump. At a bizarre Cabinet meeting in June 2017, in which nearly every other official offered effusive praise for Trump, Mattis didn’t. Instead, he’s been traveling the world while trying to hold back a rush to war on the Korean Peninsula, born of a rhetorical spat between his boss and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un. His plane is a Cold War–era Boeing E4-B…

THINGS GET STRANGER THE FARTHER AWAY YOU are from home, and wherever you come from, there’s nowhere farther than the North Pole. That’s where Longyearbyen is located. It somehow resides on an Arctic Ocean archipelago called Svalbard. More than 2,000 residents live here, including hundreds of children who were rescued from abusive homes. Everyone here is subject to Norwegian law—and some bizarre restrictions, including one that prohibits death. You can’t die in Longyearbyen, but the place is constantly trying to kill you. Every year, the permafrost expands at a rate of about 4 centimeters, and with it, the graves of virus-ridden corpses (apparently death wasn’t always against the law). The climate keeps the bodies from decaying, to the delight of the few animals that can survive the Arctic winter, namely…

IN 1860, THE SLAVE SHIP CLOTILDA made its final voyage from West Africa to Alabama, transporting 110 people to be sold into slavery. But sometime after the ship anchored, its captain, William Foster, and his business partner, Timothy Meaher, panicked. Human trafficking had been illegal since 1808, and they worried they’d get caught. So they burned the ship and let its remains sink, according to Foster’s journal, which rendered the vessel lost—until now. Last October, Ben Raines, a reporter with Alabama news website AL.com, asked Russell Ladd, who lives near the muddy backwaters where the Clotilda sank, what he knew about the ship’s whereabouts. Ladd’s family has worked in shipping insurance and lived in Mobile for decades;. they own a swath of land, accessible only by boat, about 8 miles…

“All those laws and regulations are written in a dead miner’s blood.” LAST SUMMER, RODNEY OSBORNE was nearing the end of a double shift at the Gateway Eagle Mine in West Virginia when a rotating drill crushed him to death. A subsequent federal investigation showed that Osborne, 32, had not received adequate safety training on the device. “It feels like my heart is busted,” his mother, Deloris Duffy, wrote on Face-book after her son’s death. “I’ve never hurt this bad in all my life.” Since he took office, President Donald Trump has been quick to champion the coal industry and the 771 more coal-mining jobs there were in 2017, compared with 2016. “I’m the one that saved coal,” the president told The New York Times, omitting the 17 coal-fired power…

The shortfin mako’s denticles are uniquely suited for fast swimming. THE WORLD’S FASTEST SHARK MIGHT HAVE some advice for the world’s swiftest aircraft. New research unraveling how the skin of the shortfin mako shark helps it swim at 20 miles per hour could revolutionize how airplanes, drones and wind turbines are built. Sharkskin is not as smooth as it looks; it’s actually covered with tiny, toothlike scales called denticles. Marine biologists have long believed that this skin decreases drag, or resistance, which competitive swimmers try to limit by shaving their body hair. But reducing drag isn’t the only factor in swimming speed. Lift is also key; it helps sharks thrust forward through the water. Yet no scientists had studied whether denticles improve it. “That’s what inspired us to wonder, Is…

“Checking somebody’s vitals from a distance is not something we’re used to talking about.” THE BEATING OF OUR HEART CAN be seen in our faces. It’s not visible to the human eye, but a new device captures this hidden phenomenon, offering a potentially powerful way to measure a heartbeat without touching the body. As blood pumps through our veins, it subtly changes the color of our skin. “We’re very good at measuring depth and contrasting things [with out eyes], because that’s what we’re designed to do,” says Nate Ruben, who studied electrical engineering at Utah State University (USU) and is co-founder of a startup called Photorithm. “We don’t notice slight changes in color.” Several years ago, Ruben began wondering if there was a way to measure this universe of tiny…