May 19, 2014

• Severe flooding in the Balkans has displaced at least 24,300 people and dislodged some of the 100,000 landmines in the region.
• Eighty years after two scientists first theorized how light turns into matter, three physicists devise an experiment to prove it.
• California has released thousands of Pakistani wasps to fight an invasive pest that destroyed 60,000 acres of farmland in Florida.
• Researchers posit US companies that drug test hire more black people because otherwise, they hire based on bias.
• Oslo artists recreate 1914 "Congo Village" to remind Norwegians of their nation's history of racism.
• If you write a novel "about Africa," chances are you're going to get the acacia tree treatment. And the orange sky.
• Alex Chee on the writers' colony experience.
• New book by a journalist most famous for his "Sex Lives" series suggests the Malaysia Airlines flight was shot down in a military exercise.
• The crafty world of people who make sex machines at home.
• There are far more types of fungi than the pale, umbrella-shaped variety.
• More students in the United States drop out of college than finish it.
• See also: Student debt is growing fastest at the universities with the highest paid presidents.
• The KIPP charter schools' "character education" model doesn't work—we don't know how to teach "character."
• How online gaming communities have learned to curb abuse—their findings can be applied to other communities.
• The​ ​song that​ ​popularized the pill.