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Melissa Ilardo How Asia's Super Divers Evolved for a Life At Sea
Scientists are starting to uncover the genetic basis of the Bajau people’s incredible breath-holding abilities.
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Portra / Getty Images When Will the Gender Gap in Science Disappear?
A new study estimates that it will take 16 years for women and men to publish papers in equal numbers. For physics, it will take 258.
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Emmanuel Foudrot / Reuters In a Few Centuries, Cows Could Be the Largest Land Animals Left
Throughout our entire history, humans and other hominins have selectively killed off the largest mammals.
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Avi Jacob, Bar-Ilan University Microscopy Unit Scientists Genetically Engineered Flies to Ejaculate Under Red Light
Their experiments confirm that sex is pleasurable, even for animals we think of as simple.
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Pat Wellenbach / AP The Shellfish Gene
One strange piece of mobile DNA has spread itself throughout the oceans, claiming real estate in the genomes of clams, fish, and more.
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Mark Chappell This Hummingbird's Tail Whistles, and No One's Sure Why
When the male birds perform their death-defying mating rituals, their feathers sing. But the obvious explanation doesn't make sense.
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Gene Hunt / Smithsonian When a Bigger Penis Means Swifter Extinction
For one group of tiny crustaceans, the species whose males invest most heavily in sex disappear ten times faster.
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Love nature / Getty Images An Inordinate Fondness for Wasps
There are probably more species of them than any other animal group.
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Fernando Castillo / AFP / Getty Why Whales Got So Big
It’s often said that the ocean releases them from the constraints of life on land. It’s actually the opposite.
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Leearne Hollowood / Reuters Once Again, a Massive Group of Whales Strands Itself
The deaths of around 150 pilot whales on an Australian beach is just the latest in a long line of mass casualties.
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Craig Barritt / Getty / The Atlantic Trump’s Pick for CDC Director Is Experienced But Controversial
On the face of it, veteran virologist Robert Redfield seems like a good pick to lead the agency, but decades-old disputes are shadowing his appointment.
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Zachary Zakibe The Blind Fish That Should Have Diabetes, But Somehow Doesn't
Its ability to cope with wildly fluctuating blood-sugar levels might provide clues to improving human health.
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Thomas Mukoya / Reuters The Last Male Northern White Rhino Is Dead
It is a tragic moment—even for a subspecies that is already functionally extinct.
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Vasilia Christidou What We Learn From 50 Years of Kids Drawing Scientists
Children are more likely to draw women than in the past—but they become skewed toward sketching men as they get older.
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Siphiwe Sibeko / Reuters The Predictable March of Corpse-Eating Microbes
A new video explains how the necrobiome might be valuable to forensic investigators.
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Human Origins Program / Smithsonian A Cultural Leap at the Dawn of Humanity
New finds from Kenya suggest that humans used long-distance trade networks, sophisticated tools, and symbolic pigments right from the dawn of our species.
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Jose Manuel Ribeiro / Reuters A Twist in Our Sexual Encounters With Other Ancient Humans
A new study suggests that early humans mated with the mysterious Denisovans in two separate waves.
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Aaron Takeo Ninokawa What a Giant Soda Stream Reveals About the Fate of Corals
Reefs will struggle as the oceans become more acidic.
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Photographee.eu / Shutterstock / The Atlantic How Psychopaths See the World
It’s not that they can’t consider other people’s perspectives. It’s that they don’t do so automatically.
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Antonio Parrinello / Reuters Supervolcano Goes Boom. Humans Go Meh?
A new study shows that people in South Africa weren’t fazed by the massive Toba eruption of 74,000 years ago, which supposedly created a global winter that nearly ended humanity.
