Is This the World’s Best Chocolate? (Smithsonian Magazine)
by Heide Brandes
In the nineteenth century, the Nacional variety of cacao from Ecuador became known for producing an astonishingly delicious chocolate. A century after most of the trees were wiped out, there’s a new effort to bring the species back—and fight deforestation.

The Vibes-Based Tech Industry (Public Books)
by Johannes Lenhard
Venture capital firms play an enormous role in determining which tech companies will flourish. Their methods for choosing winners involves a whole lot of emotional thinking.

Can AI Find the Aliens? (Wired)
by Ramin Skibba
Humans’ search for alien life so far has relied on many assumptions about what it might look like. A new approach using artificial intelligence might be more effective—and might find a lot of other interesting things in the process.

The Mystery of the Ancient Goat Teeth (Sapiens)
by Melina Seabrook
An archaeologist working in southern Iran discovered that a small group of 4,000-year-old goat bones showed evidence that the goats had terrible, and probably very painful, tooth problems. The likely reason why reflects the ambiguous value to animals of being domesticated by humans.

Building a Better Bird House (Undark)
by Marta Zaraska
Refuges for displaced wild creatures sometimes turn out to unintentionally set the animals up for disaster. Can new technology help find better ways to keep them safe?

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