Max Plenke

Every night, 40 million Americans lie awake while stress and anxiety make their mental cylinders fire. They turn a rough day at work into a repeating string of lousy song lyrics or an intense need to replay a breakup that happened a decade ago. They…

With a week to go until the 2016 presidential election, the candidates are campaigning hard in battleground states that are key to locking down a victory. For Donald Trump, things are looking up, after a new ABC/Washington Post tracking poll put…

It's November 1, and that means the election is a week away. Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump incurred October drama — for Clinton, a renewed investigation of her emails, for Trump, leaked tapes of him talking about sexually assaulting women —…

On Friday, FBI Director James Comey publicly announced he was again looking into the case of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's email server after a batch of emails was discovered during an unrelated investigation into…

Once a year, the ghouls, ghosts, witches and weirdos come out of the woodwork to charge through Manhattan's Greenwich Village. But not the regular ghouls you'd see at 2 a.m. tumbling out of some underground bar.  This is the NYC Halloween Parade.…

Actor Leonardo DiCaprio's new documentary, Before the Flood, takes a hard look at the impact climate change will have on the planet and what the global society needs to do to save Earth's ecosystems.  Directed by Fisher Stevens — who you might…

As if the Schiaparelli lander's mission to Mars wasn't tough enough, now it sounds like a computer glitch may have sent the poor thing to its death. Schiaparelli's leg of the European Space Agency's ExoMars mission was supposed to be a peaceful,…

On Oct. 24, 1946, the first extraterrestrial view of Earth was shot from 65 miles away aboard a Nazi-built V-2 rocket launched by American scientists, according to Smithsonian magazine. Thanks to a Devry 35-millimeter movie camera, Earthlings saw…

On Sept. 15, Michael Funk died four days after Vibrio vulnificus, a flesh-eating bacteria that occurs naturally in slightly salty, warm water, entered a cut in his leg.  Man's death from flesh-eating bacteria like a "horror movie" His wife told the…

This year, the planet changed in ways that should worry even the most stubborn climate change deniers. We saw (and continue to see) the hottest months on record, witnessed the first mammalian extinction related to climate change and were hit with…

Sometimes, states are firmly in the camp of one political party or the other. Texas usually goes red. Minnesota usually goes blue. Some states are historically expected to swing left or right. But there are some states that aren't decided until late…

On October 6, Atlas Obscura came out with a clown-sighting heat map, a comprehensive guide to all the hellbent Bozos and Bubbles spotted roaming the streets and forests of the United States. But early October, when the cases of clowning had already…

Hurricane Nicole, the powerful storm that hit Bermuda days after Hurricane Matthew pummeled the Caribbean, is blowing further out to sea. All storm warnings for Atlantic costal areas have ceased, according to the National Hurricane Center, leaving…

As of 2 p.m. local time on Thursday, Hurricane Nicole was on its way out to sea, 90 miles northeast of Bermuda and blowing northeast at a rate of 18 miles per hour, according to a bulletin from the National Hurricane Center. Bermuda caught the brunt…

As of 11 a.m. local time Thursday, Hurricane Nicole — a Category 3 hurricane arriving on the coattails of the deadly Hurricane Matthew — was passing over the small British island territory of Bermuda, according to a bulletin from the National…

Hurricane Matthew may have left the Caribbean, but now the Atlantic islands are facing a new natural adversary: Hurricane Nicole, which is forecast to hit Bermuda on Thursday. Nicole could bring at least 74-mph winds and powerful rain to Bermuda, a…

The 2016 election may be getting less neck-and-neck every day, but the United States has a history of close-call elections under its belt.  It's happened at all levels of government: in a small Nevada town, two aspiring county commissioners dueled…

A Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday revealed an alarming fact: In 2015, there were more arrests in the United States for marijuana possession than for all violent crimes put together.  The report found that, in 2015, there were more than…

Barack Obama, in his last few months as president of the United States, just published a CNN op-ed covering a modern science power play: putting humans on Mars by the 2030s. Spelled out in the kind of patriotic go-get-'em hype fit for…