Karan Jani’s obsession with black holes sparked when he picked up a secondhand copy of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. Three years later, he found himself having lunch with the famed physicist at the Black Hole Bistro at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada, where Jani was a research fellow. I caught up with the laid-back 28-year-old on a recent Saturday, connecting via Skype from his parents’ home in Vadodara, a city in the state of Gujarat, India. A newly minted Ph.D. graduate from Georgia Tech, Jani was home for a break, he says, putting air quotes around “break” since he’d had hardly any time to himself or with his family. Instead, he’d been giving back-to-back lectures at colleges around the country, talking to students about careers in science.

Ah, the modern world. The news we read is fed to us by Facebook. The jobs we apply for are filtered by LinkedIn. The perfect Instagram feeds of our “friends” instill a growing sense of social anxiety while our politicians communicate to us in 140 characters or less.

Last June, Alejandro Arboleda Uribe was awakened from an afternoon nap by police kicking in the door of his apartment in a posh district of Medellín. The 32-year-old drug kingpin probably assumed the protection of Mexican cartels and renaissance elements of the old Medellín cartel inoculated him from this kind of raid. Not so. Capping years of investigation, Interpol and the Colombian police nailed him and 13 others in his organization and seized their stash, but it wasn’t cocaine. Uribe peddled synthetic drugs: ecstasy, MDMA, acid and his own recipe for a new favorite among Colombia’s youth – a pink powder called 2C-B.

As a true-crime fanatic, I’ve read a ton of books on La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia, the Syndicate or whatever you want to call it. Mobster books make for engrossing, engaging and oftentimes brutal reads. With the intertwining and romanticized ideologies of death before dishonor and omertà — the code of silence — the glorification of the mob in pop culture has proliferated, promoting a vital, though not always true, story line in the chronicles of Mafia lore.

For years, doctors have been telling patients with high cholesterol and a risk of developing heart disease to follow a Mediterranean diet, which favors fish and poultry over red meat and includes fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts and olive oil. However, according to a recent Italian study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology:

A MEDITERRANEAN DIET ONLY WORKS IF YOU HAVE A HIGH INCOME OR YOU’RE HIGHLY EDUCATED.

It was like walking into a time capsule, the principal said, when contractors at a high school in Oklahoma City stumbled upon century-old chalkboards during a renovation project this year. Almost perfectly preserved, the chalkboards held neatly marked math problems, arithmetic tables and multicolored drawings. The superintendent of the Oklahoma City Schools called them “artifacts” and vowed to preserve them at all costs.