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Bennu Phoenix / Alamy; The Atlantic Brain Maps Are a Trap
Memory and other mental functions can’t simply be reduced to one part of the brain.
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Urban Zintel / laif / Redux A Major Climate Idea Is Based on Some Shaky Science
At least for now, we can’t just trap carbon in the soil.
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Wulong Tommy / Quanta Magazine Blue Animals Are Different From All the Rest
Some of the colors we see on creatures such as blue jays and poison-dart frogs aren’t created by pigments at all.
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All Canada Photos / Alamy Stock Photo Two Arctic Fish Are Breaking the Rules of Genetics
“I’m still very much puzzled about how this is possible."
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Samantha Mash / Quanta Magazine Earth’s Underground Worlds May Run on Radioactive Decay
No sunlight, no problem.
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A Portal to Mars on the Tip of Iceland
A volcano erupting on the island is a living replica of what once happened on Mars.
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Christian Vorhofer/ imageBROKER / Alamy The Arctic Has a Cloud Problem
Tiny iodine particles are clumping together to trap sunlight and melt polar sea ice.
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MARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY / GETTY A New Era of Black Holes Is Here
Astronomers have discovered a black-hole treasure trove that is changing our view of the cosmos.
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NASA / JPL-Caltech / University of Arizona Mars Doesn’t Look So Dead After All
New discoveries have raised the possibility that the planet’s volcanoes, long assumed dormant, may still be active.
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New York Public Library Where Are All the Tiny Black Holes?
The discovery of a celestial “unicorn” that’s just a slim 2.9 solar masses may help unravel a mystery that has long puzzled astronomers.
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Jeremy Sanders, Hermann Brunner and the eSASS team … The 70-Year-Old Mystery of Two Galactic Mushroom Clouds
Giant bubbles hovering over the Milky Way seem to be remnants of an ancient explosion.
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Samuel Velasco / Quanta Magazine Survival of the Luckiest
Natural selection isn’t the only way species evolve.
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Computational Physics Inc. Life as We Know It Hinges on One Very Small Decimal
Give it up for 1/137.
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Sakkmesterke / Science Photo Library The Universe Might Be Too Thin
Scientists may have found a new crack in our understanding of the universe.
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Lars Lehnert / 500px / Getty Penguins Are Nature’s Best Snugglers
How they huddle is so mathematically perfect that mathematicians can’t design a better way themselves.
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Space Frontiers / Getty Continent-Size Pressure Waves Are Rippling Through Earth’s Atmosphere
Scientists first theorized about the waves 220 years ago. In June, they finally found solid evidence.
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Jenő Káldy / Quanta This Fish Should Not Exist
“It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.”
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NASA A Breakthrough Some Cosmologists Thought Would Never Come
A new theory of the universe’s structure might offer the most plausible alternative yet to dark matter.
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Usman Bashir How Loners Are an Evolutionary Insurance Policy
Organisms that don’t follow the herd may not be stragglers, but nature’s way of hedging its bets.
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Ave Calvar / Quanta The Last Place on Earth We’d Ever Expect to Find Life
Microbes are turning up deep beneath the ocean floor, a sign that life might have fewer limits than scientists once thought.
