
Detective Fiction Has Nothing on This Victorian-Science Murder Mystery
William Saville-Kent was a pioneering coral photographer. Was he also hiding a grisly secret?
William Saville-Kent was a pioneering coral photographer. Was he also hiding a grisly secret?
Without tourism, the funding that sustains some of the world’s most treasured wildlife has atrophied.
With the right partners, scientists don’t have to visit their study sites to get good data.
The only way to give them the space they need might be to seek them out.
In Virginia’s Elizabeth River, the unremarkable-looking mummichog has survived decades of industrial pollution—but the price it has paid has worrying implications for human health.
For centuries, red coral was traded all over the world. Now it’s disappearing.
For a deep-sea parasitic worm, the epic journey to adulthood starts in a fish’s intestines.
We broke phosphorus.
Killer whales that feast on seals and hunt in small packs are thriving while their widely beloved siblings are dying out.
The helmeted hornbill can’t procreate without a particular type of tree hole, so scientists are trying to build it artificial ones.
Brazil’s pink river dolphins have long gotten blamed for all sorts of heinous crimes.
The rare Chilean soapbark tree produces compounds that can boost the body’s reaction to vaccines.
Coffee plants were supposed to be safe on this side of the Atlantic. But the fungus found them.
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.
Trees now cover most of the exclusion zone, and climate change is making them more likely to burn.
In the beach towns south of Melbourne, everyone, it seems, knows someone who’s been attacked.
For centuries, scientists have obsessed over a primordial blob that can shape-shift, clone itself, and live indefinitely.
Inside the U.S. and Panama’s long-running collaboration to rid an entire continent of a deadly disease
Samoa’s population of “little dodos” is dwindling down to nothing, but the appetites of wealthy people keep putting these rare birds at risk.
Even as it disappears, the “bomb spike” is revealing the ways humans have reshaped the planet.
The “crazy worms” remaking forests aren’t your friendly neighborhood garden worms. Then again, those aren’t so great either.
Conservation has become a war, and park rangers and poachers are the soldiers.
Amber is helping scientists discover how the ancient world worked.
To change the fate of the kittiwake, scientists are trying to model its world.
To save Brazil’s giant anteaters, scientists are grappling with one of the planet’s most transformative forces: roads.
Scientists dreamed of genetically engineering a flower patterned in the Games’ blue-and-white checkerboard emblem.
In a warming ocean, Alexandrium algae are shredding marine food webs—and disrupting beloved Alaska traditions.
The opioid epidemic may be to blame for a rising incidence of illegal tree-felling.
Beneath the surface of one of Germany’s deepest lakes, researchers are studying the hidden effects of artificial light.
Fossils preserved in sap offer an astonishingly clear view of the distant past, but they come at a high price.
Wolves pose a uniquely difficult conservation issue.
In the coastal rain forests of British Columbia, stolen timber is traded for a quick fix.
Even in one of the world’s richest countries, humans have a hard time coexisting with wolves.
A species of highly toxic fungi is making its way across North America at an alarming speed.
As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move.
“There’s nothing in the taste that tells you what you are eating is about to kill you.”
In the midst of political and economic chaos, Venezuelan researchers are struggling to save the scientific legacy of their country’s fast-melting ice.
First Nations communities are leading the effort to rescue the last remaining caribou herds from extinction.
In the Martian landscape that is the Atacama desert, astrobiologists are learning how to recognize extraterrestrial organisms.
Thanks to the compounds used to protect precious flowers, antifungal resistance is here—and it could be just as dangerous to humans as antibiotic resistance.
They live thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. They eat hydrogen and exhale methane. And they may shape our world more profoundly than we can imagine.
Invasive species are sometimes trapped, poisoned, and shot in large numbers to save native species from extinction. Some scientists say the bloodshed isn’t worth it.
The world’s largest mollusks are experts at turning sunshine and algae into fuel.
A mysterious wildcat in Sri Lanka may hold a clue.
Life can be hell for giants of the deep—but does it have to be?
To save the tiny seabird, scientists are venturing to its secret home in the Atacama Desert—and sticking their noses into a lot of stinky holes in the ground.
The vaccine for Hendra, a virus that can spread from horses to humans, has pitted owners against vets—revealing that science alone can't prevent the next global pandemic.
A visit to a facility in Guangdong province, where researchers are tinkering with monkey brains in order to understand the most severe forms of autism
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.
A writer comes face-to-face with the cat deep in the Amazon jungle and left with a new understanding of its surprising resilience to poaching and habitat loss.
In a race against antibiotic resistance, a Norwegian research team sails into the Arctic darkness.
How sugar daddies and vaginal microbes created the world’s largest HIV epidemic
For a decade, zookeepers have known that something strange was stopping the giant animals’ hearts—now they’re beginning to trace the culprit to their guts.
More than 50 million Americans are conducting an unwitting experiment on a vast scale. I joined them from my Manhattan high-rise.
At a shiny new lab in Japan, an international team of scientists is trying to figure out what puts us under.
What lurks in the Arctic’s thawing permafrost?