Ed Yong
The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?
The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.
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Pascal Rossignol / Reuters Scientists Finally Crack Wheat’s Absurdly Complex Genome
Their efforts will make it much easier to breed new varieties of the world’s most important crop.
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Radu Sigheti / Reuters Elephants Have a Secret Weapon Against Cancer
The biggest animals should have the highest risks of developing tumors, but they don’t.
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Chase Dekker Wild-Life Images / Getty What a Grieving Orca Tells Us
People know a famous community of killer whales as individuals, with their own names, families, and personalities—which has made their woes even harder to take.
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Kerstin Meyer / Getty An Ancient Genetic Quirk Could Doom Whales Today
After losing an unnecessary gene millions of years ago, marine mammals are now uniquely vulnerable to pesticides that have only existed for a century.
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Alan Bennett / UC Davis The Wonder Plant That Could Slash Fertilizer Use
An indigenous Mexican corn gets its nitrogen from the air.
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Rubberball / Getty Women More Likely to Survive Heart Attacks If Treated by Female Doctors
And male doctors do better when they have more female colleagues.
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Sue Ogrocki / AP / The Atlantic Trump Finally Picks a Science Adviser—And People Are Delighted
His nominee, Kelvin Droegemeier, is an accomplished meteorologist who studies storms and other extreme weather.
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Ed Yong A Behind-the-Scenes Peek at the Smithsonian’s New Dinosaur Hall
The museum is giving its ancient animals a modern makeover.
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Matt Kasson This Parasite Drugs Its Hosts With the Psychedelic Chemical in Shrooms
It also makes their butts fall off.
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Colin Donihue After Last Year's Hurricanes, Caribbean Lizards Are Better at Holding on for Dear Life
A stunning case of natural selection in action
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Carolyn Elya Is This Fungus Using a Virus to Control an Animal's Mind?
An unusual detective story
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Robert Benson / Getty Images An Enormous Study of the Genes Related to Staying in School
Researchers have found 1,271 gene variants associated with years of formal education. That’s important, but not for the obvious reasons.
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Thomas Mukoya / Reuters Humans Have Unleashed a ‘Landscape of Fear’
By killing the biggest animals, we’ve allowed smaller and more vulnerable species to remodel the terrain.
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Luiz Rocha / California Academy of Sciences There Is No Escape for Corals
Deep waters have long been seen as potential refuges for endangered corals, but a new study suggests that they offer no sanctuary.
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Graham Beards / Wikimedia How Viruses Cooperate to Defeat CRISPR
Some weaken their hosts’ immune systems by sacrificing themselves in kamikaze fashion, paving the way for successful infections later.
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Kaeli Swift Crows Sometimes Have Sex With Their Dead
It can get aggressive.
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Ernesto Benavides / Getty Even More Evidence for the Link Between Alzheimer’s and Herpes
Several new studies have rejuvenated a long-dismissed idea that links the common brain disease to the viral infections.
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Nick Graham How Rats Remake Coral Reefs
By eating seabirds, the rodents weaken the flow of nutrients into the oceans, endangering coral reefs and the fish that live there.
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Ryan Somma / Flickr / Katie Martin / ... The New Story of Humanity's Origins in Africa
Several new discoveries suggest that our species didn’t arise from a single point in space. Instead, the entire continent was our cradle.
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Mario Anzuoni / Reuters The Original American Dogs Are Gone
The closest living relative of the precolonial canines isn’t even a dog. It’s a contagious cancer.
