A visit with David Quammen, who confronted in COVID a story that refused to stay at a safe distance
Every year, as many as 400 million people are infected with life-threatening diseases by the Aedes aegypti mosquito. It wasn’t always so dangerous.
Some seismologists think two massive anomalies under Africa and the Pacific are made of ancient, smoldering rock.
In the landscape where Mad Max: Fury Road was filmed, a scientist is trying to understand a natural phenomenon that has eluded explanation for decades.
The challenges of moving bots off the chess board and into the mess of life
The automation of astronomy has only just begun—and there's no telling where it will end.
Decades after its waters were declared safe, Minamata, Japan, still lives with the effects of its namesake disease.
An astrophysicist wants to test what happens when things get too close to a dense, dark lump at the center of the Milky Way.
An evolutionary biologist studies how flocks of birds, slime molds, networks of neurons, and other biological collectives jointly process information.
The debate over whether an arachnid’s web is actually a part of its mind
Two camps of theorists are bickering in public—with one saying the others’ ideas don’t even qualify as science.
After long believing that exploding stars forged the coveted metal, researchers are now divided over which extraordinary cosmic event is truly responsible.
Florida has already pulled panthers back from the brink of extinction—but to keep them alive, people will have to be comfortable with one showing up on their back porch.
A new hydroelectric facility in Canada could push dangerous amounts of methylmercury into communities that rely on seafood.
The surprise detection of a massive, Milky Way-size system mostly made of dark matter is changing astronomers’ ideas about how galaxies form.
And not the ones in Earth's skies.
Some species work on their beach body. Others work on their pipes.
A thought experiment