Ed Yong
Ed is also the recipient of the George Polk Award for Science Reporting, as well as several other awards. He is the author of I Contain Multitudes, a New York Times best seller, and the forthcoming title An Immense World.
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Anne Sustar / The Atlantic. These Animals Shouldn’t Be Alive, Much Less Sprinting
Snow flies have adapted to keep running in subzero temperatures, but their time is running out.
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Photo-illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Library of Congress; … The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme
Forget changing only the names that honor the horrors of the past. Some biologists now argue no species should ever be named after a single individual.
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William Ratcliff One of Evolution’s Biggest Moments Was Re-created in a Year
A unique experiment shows how multicellular organisms might have evolved from single-celled ancestors.
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Photo illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Ian Hewson … The Sea-Urchin Murderer Has Finally Been Apprehended
Most such mysteries go unsolved. But in this case, a crack team of scientists quickly found a culprit.
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Illustration by Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty Long COVID Is Being Erased—Again
What was once outright denial has morphed into a subtler dismissal.
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The Atlantic The Pandemic’s Legacy Is Already Clear
All of this will happen again.
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Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty Long COVID Has Forced a Reckoning for One of Medicine’s Most Neglected Diseases
Only a couple dozen doctors specialize in chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS). Now their knowledge could be crucial to treating millions more patients.
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The Atlantic One of Long COVID’s Worst Symptoms Is Also Its Most Misunderstood
Brain fog isn’t like a hangover or depression. It’s a disorder of executive function that makes basic cognitive tasks absurdly hard.
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Tom Kelley / Getty A New Test for an Old Theory About Dreams
When a sleeping animal’s eyes twitch beneath its eyelids, is it looking around a dream world?
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Mary Beth Saffo, Ph.D / PNAS The Creature That Gave Up Parasitism for … Wait, What?
It’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a kidney.
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Paul Spella / The Atlantic; Getty America Was in an Early-Death Crisis Long Before COVID
Even before the pandemic began, more people here were dying at younger ages than in comparably wealthy nations.
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Getty / The Atlantic How to Successfully Smash Your Face Against a Tree
A new study refutes the widespread idea that woodpeckers have shock-absorbing heads.
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Spencer Platt / Getty Is BA.5 the ‘Reinfection Wave’?
The latest surge is a test of our pandemic priorities.
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The Atlantic America Is Sliding Into the Long Pandemic Defeat
In the face of government inaction, the country’s best chance at keeping the crisis from spiraling relies on everyone to keep caring.
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Kristin Laidre / University of Washington Will These Be the Last Polar Bears on Earth?
A newly identified population in Greenland is less dependent on the vanishing sea ice. But even they can’t hold out forever.
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Shayan Asgharnia for The Atlantic How Animals Perceive the World
Every creature lives within its own sensory bubble, but only humans have the capacity to appreciate the experiences of other species. What we’ve learned is astounding.
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A. Calegari / De Agostini / Getty Rats Learned to Hide and Seek. Scientists Learned Way More.
To study something as freewheeling, spontaneous, and variable as play, researchers had to get creative.
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The Atlantic So, Have You Heard About Monkeypox?
A new viral outbreak is testing whether the world has learned anything from COVID.
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Victor J. Blue / The New York Times … What COVID Hospitalization Numbers Are Missing
As COVID numbers tick up, hospitals are supposed to be ready to jump in as needed. Only, they never really had a reprieve.
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Getty; The Atlantic We Created the ‘Pandemicene’
By completely rewiring the network of animal viruses, climate change is creating a new age of infectious dangers.
