I had the opportunity earlier this month to be a panelist at the Vocus User Conference here in Washington DC. All the flacks wanted to hear what the Future of Media looks like from a freelance perspective…and out of all the freelancers in the DC area, they chose me. I’m humbled. I’ll be honest with [...]

A decade ago, as Shanghai’s population approached 18 million and housing prices skyrocketed, the city decided to act. City planners developed an initiative called “One City, Nine Towns”—satellite suburbs would be built on farmland outside Shanghai to house one million people by 2020.

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2010-06-10 They’re not the most aww-inspiring baby pictures, but new infrared images prove the youngest known planet outside our solar system does in fact exist—and that planets can grow up fast—a new study says. Probably only a few million years young, Beta Pictoris b is already fully formed, despite [...]

Published in National Geographic News Saltwater crocodiles in the South Pacific travel between islands by body surfing, according to new research designed in part by late “Crocodile Hunter” Steve Irwin. The world’s largest living reptile, the saltwater crocodile is found in brackish and freshwater habitats extending east-west from East India to Fiji and north-south from [...]

Published in National Geographic News A “super Jupiter” and its sibling world have been found circling their parent star with steeply tilted orbits—the first time such a configuration has ever been spotted, astronomers say. All eight planets in our solar system orbit the sun in roughly the same plane, an imaginary disk that extends from [...]

Amid efforts to cap the seafloor leak, cleanup workers have been using boat-based skimmers to pick up the oil, booms to gather the slick for burning, and chemical dispersants to break the crude into smaller droplets—all parts of the oil-fighting toolkit for decades. Soon, though, tech of the future could be cleaning up spills like this one.

Frito-Lay studied women’s brains to help develop an ad campaign, and Campbell Soup (CPB, Fortune 500) just unveiled a packaging redesign based on consumers’ “neurological and bodily responses” to different mockups. By hooking customers up to EEG or MRI machines, a company can learn about what’s really going on inside a buyer’s brain — possibly even before the buyer knows it.

The so-called pregnant man has company: One of the most common weed killers in the United States can make male frogs lay eggs, a new study says.

Atrazine, widely used to kill pests on U.S. croplands, is an endocrine disruptor—a substance that interferes with animals’ reproductive systems.

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2010-02-09 If you want to celebrate the universe’s birthday, you might need to add a few more candles to the cake. That’s because our universe is about 20 million years older than thought, according to the most accurate measurement yet made of the universe’s age. The data are the [...]

by Rachel KaufmanPublished in National Geographic News2010-02-03 Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition [...]