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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Markus Bühler Narlugas Are Real
A very strange hybrid whale was the offspring of a narwhal mother and a beluga father.
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Tryton2011 / Shutterstock Why Hundreds of Puffins Washed Up Dead on an Alaskan Beach
This latest mass-mortality event is another sign of the Arctic’s rapidly changing climate.
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Tane Sinclair-Taylor The Tiny Fish That Break a Fundamental Rule of Vertebrate Life
By living fast and getting eaten in extreme numbers, these overlooked critters fuel the food webs that allow vast communities to flourish in coral reefs.
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Marcus Drymon Why So Many Sharks Have Bird Feathers in Their Bellies
Spoiler: Migration is hard.
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Martin Surbeck Bonobo Mothers Are Very Concerned About Their Sons’ Sex Lives
They’ll fight off other males who try to interfere.
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Sean Nel / Shutterstock A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers
Decades of early research on the genetics of depression were built on nonexistent foundations. How did that happen?
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Sarah Han A Truly Remarkable Spider
The spider Hyptiotes reinvented the concept of the web, building an extraordinary, spring-loaded trap.
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ROMAIN LAFABREGUE / AFP / Getty A Dying Teenager’s Recovery Started in the Dirt
One of the viruses used to treat her infections came from the side of a rotting South African eggplant.
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Chung-Tat Cheung Another Bat-Winged Dinosaur Has Been Found
Ambopteryx had a long wristbone that likely supported leathery membranes, allowing it to glide between trees.
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Courtesy of Carlos R. Ponce et al. / ... AI Evolved These Creepy Images to Please a Monkey’s Brain
What happens when an algorithm can ask neurons what they want to see?
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Mike Blake, Reuters The Giant Panda Is a Closet Carnivore
A new study shows that the nutrient profile of the bear’s all-bamboo diet is much closer to that of a typical meat eater.
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Dongju Zhang, Lanzhou University A Revealing Piece of Ancient Human History, Discovered in a Tibetan Cave
The remarkable, fossilized jawbone has no chin, and the teeth within it are exceptionally large.
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CNES/Airbus; DigitalGlobe Mysterious Rings Around Reefs Have No Simple Explanation
These strange, barren halos are thought to be the work of fearful fish—but the reality is far more complicated.
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Ritzau Scanpix Denmark / Reuters This Is the Way the Animals Arose: Not With a Bang, but With a Bunch of Bangs
The much-hyped Cambrian explosion may have been just one burst in a marathon evolutionary fireworks display.
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Dave J Hogan / Getty The Predator That Makes Great White Sharks Flee in Fear
Better to run than to have your liver squeezed out.
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Denis Balibouse / Reuters Scientists Partly Restore Activity in Dead-Pig Brains
Now what?
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Mayako Kutsukake Exploding Aphids Plaster Holes in Their Home With Bodily Fluids
In an extreme version of the clotting process, the bugs suicidally erupt to save their nest.
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Mike Coppola / Getty A Natural-History Museum Is Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's New President
Critics say that a planned event at the American Museum of Natural History honoring Jair Bolsonaro is antithetical to the institute’s mission and values.
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Sophie Lanfear The Disturbing Walrus Scene in Our Planet
A shocking sequence shows the huge mammals scaling steep cliffs, then falling to their death.
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Ben Macdonald Netflix’s Our Planet Says What Other Nature Series Have Omitted
In a groundbreaking move, the beautiful but uncomfortable documentary forces viewers to acknowledge their own complicity in the decline of nature.
