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James Akena / Reuters The Success of Paying People to Not Cut Down Trees
A first-of-its-kind experiment validates a powerful way for rich countries to cost-effectively reduce carbon emissions.
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Jim Urquhart / Reuters The Man Who Blew The Door Off The Microbial World
Norm Pace has spent his life as an explorer, charting dangerous caves and ushering in the golden age of microbiology.
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Ismail Taxta / Reuters Turning Baker’s Yeast Into a Disease Sensor
With a few tweaks, the fungus behind bread and beer could become a simple, low-cost cholera detector.
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Andrew Winning What Would It Take to Completely Sterilize the Earth?
Three astrophysicists calculate that even huge asteroids and exploding stars probably wouldn’t wipe out all life.
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Mario Anzuoni / Reuters Ravens Can Plan for the Future
They join an elite group of animals that includes great apes, but not monkeys or 3-year-old human children.
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Library of Congress Scientists Can Use CRISPR to Store Images and Movies in Bacteria
It’s a step toward turning microbes into living hard drives.
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USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab / Flickr One Man's Plan to Make Sure Gene Editing Doesn't Go Haywire
Kevin Esvelt argues that the tremendous power of CRISPR can only be contained if scientists are open about their research.
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Radu Sigheti / Reuters It's a Mistake to Focus Just on Animal Extinctions
Population declines tell a much scarier story.
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Rob Robbins Sea Spiders Pump Blood With Their Guts, Not Their Hearts
When an animal’s body consists almost entirely of leg, its biology gets really weird.
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Mike Hutchings The Bipartisan Fight for Quieter Oceans
The Trump administration wants to prospect the Atlantic for oil and gas using loud explosive blasts that will seriously harm whales, fish, and other marine life.
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Reuters How the Democratic Republic of the Congo Beat Ebola in 42 Days
The latest outbreak was swiftly contained by a fast, decisive response, acting as a model for containing infectious diseases in remote places.
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Mario Tama / Getty The Moral Question That Stanford Asks Its Bioengineering Students
It’s about the capacity to print a human genome.
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AP How African Americans Use DNA Testing to Connect With Their Past
Genetic tests have ushered in a new era of root-seeking and community-building, says social scientist Alondra Nelson.
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Eloy Alonso / Reuters How CRISPR Yanked Jennifer Doudna Out of the Ivory Tower
The pioneer biochemist feels a responsibility to weigh in on ethical debates about gene editing.
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Natallia Ablazhei / Reuters Why Are Bird Eggs Egg-Shaped? An Eggsplainer
A new study points to a surprising reason for the varied shape of bird eggs—and shows that most eggs aren’t actually egg-shaped.
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Nathan Morehouse This Common Butterfly Has an Extraordinary Sex Life
For the cabbage white, sex involves sperm packages of ungodly size, genitals that double as a souped-up stomach, and an unexpected set of chewing jaws.
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Thomas Mukoya / Reuters The Great Thing About Mass Wildebeest Drownings
Their bodies pile up by the hundreds, nourishing the Serengeti—and contributing to the circle of life.
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NOAA The Mussels That Eat Oil
With help from bacteria, these shellfish can thrive on volcanoes made of asphalt.
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Science Photo Library / Getty What If (Almost) Every Gene Affects (Almost) Everything?
Three Stanford scientists have proposed a provocative new way of thinking about genetic variants, and how they affect people’s bodies and health.
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Which Animal Murders the Most?
Humans aren't the only mammals who kill each other. So how do we stack up to lions, tigers, and bears?
