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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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.
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B. Gratwicke / Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute The Worst Disease Ever Recorded
A doomsday fungus known as Bd has condemned more species to extinction than any other pathogen.
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Runzhi Zhang Pretty Sly for a Whitefly
One of the world’s worst agricultural pests corrupts the alarm signals of plants, disarming those that otherwise might prepare for an assault.
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Peter Leopold After Two Decades, a Fishy Genetic Mystery Has Been Solved
A scientist faced down the ultimate cold case: How did two groups of fish separately evolve genes for making antifreeze?
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Stephane Blanc A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses
A plant virus distributes its genes into eight separate segments that can all reproduce, even if they infect different cells.
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Sydney Stringham This Is a Truly Lousy Experiment About Evolution
By placing feather-eating lice on white, black, and gray pigeons, researchers showed how the parasites change color to better blend in.
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Ilya Naymushin Chimpanzees Are Going Through a Tragic Loss
By fragmenting forests and killing off individuals, humans are stopping the flow of ideas among our closest relatives.
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Egoreichenkov Evgenii / Shutterstock / The Atlantic An Ingenious Injection Can Create Infrared Vision
Nanotech particles expanded mice’s sense of sight. But would they work in humans?
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Alan Jamieson / Newcastle University A Troubling Discovery in the Deepest Ocean Trenches
In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.
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Jeremy A. Goldbogen Is the World’s Largest Animal Too Reliant on the Past?
A clever new study shows that blue whales lean on their memory to guide their epic migrations.
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Jorge Gonzalez Who’s the Cutest Little Tyrannosaur? Is It You?
A diminutive new species, only six feet long, fills an important gap in the origin story of the famed T. rex.
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Tim Caro The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes
By putting black-and-white coats on horses, a new study shows that the pattern discourages biting flies from landing.
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Chris McLoughlin / Getty Is the Insect Apocalypse Really Upon Us?
Claims that insects will disappear within a century are absurd, but the reality isn’t reassuring either.
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Hinterhaus Productions / Getty Small Teams of Scientists Have Fresher Ideas
A new study shows that little teams are more likely to take their research in radically new directions.
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Bettmann / Getty The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes
In a new study, researchers uncovered female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions to genetics.
