New York Times Kids, April 28, 2019...

By Tom Clynes On the Front Line of the Ebola Epidemic Author’s note: With viral epidemics back in the news, I’m reposting this long-form feature article on the Ebola outbreak in Gulu, Uganda, which I reported with photographer Seamus Murphy for National Geographic Adventure. Dr. Mike Ryan, who co-led the international response to the Gulu...

By Tom Clynes One parent’s quest to raise analog kids in a digital age Authors note: This essay first appeared in Issue 4 of Adventure Journal. I was at the campfire, flipping pancakes, when 13-year-old Ethan came over and asked if he could use my phone. “I want to show those guys a YouTube video,”...

Lessons From a 45-year Study of Super-Smart Children. A long-running investigation of exceptional children reveals what it takes to produce the scientists who will lead the twenty-first century. On a summer day in 1968, professor Julian Stanley met a brilliant but bored 12-year-old named Joseph Bates. The Baltimore student was so far ahead of his...

By: Tom Clynes A vast, interconnected network of ancient cities was home to millions more people than previously thought. Author’s note: This story, which I reported in Guatemala and Mexico, garnered more than a million reads on the National Geographic website and was picked up by nearly every major media outlet. One of the more curious...

The icon of Alaska’s wilderness symbolizes the tension between preservation and use at U.S. national parks. PARK RANGERS here call the high season—from June through early September, when Denali National Park and Preserve hosts the majority of its 500,000 annual visitors—the “hundred days of chaos.” Indeed a midsummer morning at the park’s Wilderness Access Center...

A modern-day minerals rush threatens North America’s last great wilderness.   Shawn Ryan recalls the hungry years, before his first big strike. The prospector and his family were living in a metal shack on the outskirts of Dawson, the Klondike boomtown that had declined to a ghostly remnant of its glory days. They had less...

Climate scientists routinely face death threats, hate mail, nuisance lawsuits and political attacks. How much worse can it get? There’s no police tape across Michael Mann’s office doorway this morning. “Always a good start,” he says, juggling a cup of coffee as he slides his key into the lock. Mann, a paleoclimatologist, wears a sport...

Last December, Felisa Wolfe-Simon announced the discovery of a microbe that could change the way we understand life in the universe. Soon she found herself plunged into a maelstrom of bitter backlash and intemperate criticism. A dispatch from the frontiers of the new peer review. Felisa Wolfe-Simon at Mono Lake, California, where collected the GFAJ-1...

HIV, Ebola and the vast majority of other killer diseases have passed from animals to humans. Nathan Wolfe is searching for the next AIDS before it makes the leap–and is revolutionizing the way the world tries to control diseases in the process. It’s nearly midday when Brice Bidja steps out of the tangled forest surrounding...

John McAfee stands in the New Mexican playa in front of his trike ultralight, during a Sky Gypsies aerotrekking camping expedition. Click photo above for slide show. Big ideas come easy to John McAfee. First he pioneered antivirus software, then instant messaging. Now the mercurial magnate thinks he’s on to something truly extraordinary: personal Icarus machines...

It’s Europe’s last great wilderness, a land of geysers, glaciers, fjords and farmer-poets. A land where your best guide is a thieving, murdering outlaw who’s been dead for a thousand years. “This boy Grettir—well, he was trouble from the very beginning.” High atop Drangey Island, Jón Eiriksson stands at the nub of a jagged rectangle...

By: Tom Clynes Warm beer won’t make you any friends up here, mate. Garry White’s torture trek fuels the fridge. Author’s note: I stumbled onto this fun story on my first visit to Oz. It’s still one of my favorite pieces, and I often feature it in my keynote talks.  Hidden under the rainforest canopy at the top of Australia’s...

With each outbreak of the world’s most fearsome disease, an ad hoc team of doctors and researchers risk their own lives by heading straight for ground zero. Tom Clynes joins them at the epicenter as they battle to contain the virus–and trek into the forest in search of its secrets. When the old Czech prop-plane...