Ed Yong
No One Is Prepared for Hagfish Slime
It expands by 10,000 times in a fraction of a second, it’s 100,000 times softer than Jell-O, and it fends off sharks and Priuses alike.
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Saeed Khan / AFP via Getty The Bleak Future of Australian Wildlife
The bushfires were a disaster waiting to happen for animals already fighting for survival.
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Courtesy of R. Feord What Scientists Learned by Putting 3-D Glasses on Cuttlefish
They perceive depth in a very different way than we do.
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Bruce E. Lyon The Survival Advantage of Being a Fancy Baby Coot
Unlike many other gaudy animal ornaments, the red-and-orange heads of coot chicks are honest indicators of weakness and vulnerability.
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Alfred Pasieka / Getty / The Atlantic The Startling Secret of an Invincible Virus
A phage that resists all forms of the antiviral defense known as CRISPR has an unusual means of survival.
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M. S. Savoca The Blue Whale’s Heart Beats at Extremes
For the first time, scientists recorded a cardiogram from the largest animal that has ever lived.
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Justin A. Morris / Getty What America Lost When It Lost the Bison
By migrating in huge herds, bison behave like a force of nature, engineering and intensifying waves of spring greenery that other grazers rely on.
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Arterra / Universal Images Group / Getty Apes Might Know That You Don’t Know What They Know
The latest volley in a decades-long debate about apes’ theory of mind involved one scientist dressing up as King Kong and stealing from his colleague.
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Kelly Cheng Travel Photography / Getty Has Humanity’s Homeland Been Found?
A contentious new paper traces the origins of modern humans to ancient wetlands in Africa, a claim other researchers have called far-fetched.
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Iain Lawrie / Getty Images A Textbook Evolutionary Story About Moths and Bats Is Wrong
For 50 years, researchers have thought that moths evolved ears to detect the ultrasonic calls of attacking bats—but a new study shows that ears came first.
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ROV KIEL 6000 Team / GEOMAR Kiel A Hidden World of Strange Starfish-Like Creatures in the Abyss
It has only now come to light, and could be destroyed if deep-sea mining is allowed to go ahead.
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Shutterstock The Real Danger of Booze-Making Gut Bacteria
Microbes can produce so much alcohol that people become drunk—and sustain liver damage—without touching any booze.
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Vicki Jauron / Babylon and Beyond Photography / ... The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North America
Though the continent has 3 billion fewer birds than it did in 1970, those losses are hard to glean because it’s the commonest species that have been hit hardest.
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Gabriella N. Baez / Reuters How Ancient DNA Can Help Recast Colonial History
The people of pre-colonial Puerto Rico did not disappear entirely—a new study shows that the island’s residents still carry bits of their DNA.
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Reinhold, Sanguinetti-Scheck, Hartmann, and Brecht The Game That Made Rats Jump for Joy
Scientists taught rats to play hide-and-seek in order to study natural animal behavior—but it was also fun, for both the researchers and the animals.
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L. Sousa The Truth About Electric Eels Has Long Been Overlooked
I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you.
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Jessica Meir An Astronaut Reared the World’s Highest-Flying Birds
To understand how bar-headed geese cross the Himalayas, the astronaut Jessica Meir had to raise some herself.
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Tom Shlesinger Another Blow for the Future of Corals
Certain species of coral release their eggs and sperm with perfect synchronization. But a new study suggests their incredible timing is starting to slip.
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Damir Sagolj / Reuters An Ingenious Microscope Could Change How Quickly Disease Is Detected
By analyzing blood samples 120 times faster than a traditional microscope, Octopi can lighten the load of overworked lab technicians.
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Science Photo Library A Tissue Sample From 1966 Held Traces of Early HIV
To understand the virus’s history, a team worked to reconstruct its genome from a time before anyone knew the virus existed.
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Sheila Patek One Giant Leap for Maggotkind
Even the squishy can make great bounds.
