A Once-Captive Dolphin Has Introduced Her Friends to a Silly Trend
“What we had here was an example of dolphin culture being established.”
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Projects
Life Up Close
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Vidhya Nagarajan Are Cities Making Animals Smarter?
A mysterious wild cat in Sri Lanka may hold a clue.
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Chip East / Reuters A Plane Quarantine in New York Started Out Like a Sci-Fi Nightmare
100 supposedly sick passengers ended up only being 10. But the story tapped into potent fears about flying.
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Daniel W. Clark, U.S. Navy This Tiny Songbird Rolls Its Head to Break Its Victim’s Neck
The loggerhead shrike is a hawk trapped in the body of a finch.
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Esther Aarts When Animals Take the Night Shift
They’d rather eat in the dark than risk coming across one of us.
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Ricardo Moraes / Reuters What Was Lost in Brazil’s Devastating Museum Fire
Two hundred years of work—and millions of priceless specimens—have been destroyed in a preventable tragedy.
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Joel Berger The 'Bloody Business' of Wildlife Conservation
A veteran conservationist reckons with his career studying animals in the most extreme places on Earth.
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NASA / JPL NASA Sets a Grim Deadline for Saving a Beloved Mars Rover
Some mission employees are stunned.
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Mike Hutchings / Reuters Global Warming Could Throw France’s Wine-Making Traditions Into Chaos
Earlier, “unbalanced” harvests are putting Bordeaux’s premium grapes in jeopardy.
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Max Whittaker / Reuters No Ecosystem on Earth Is Safe From Climate Change
If carbon emissions continue to grow, anyone who works with the land could face ‘unprecedented challenges.’
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Tengku Bahar / Getty The Very Hot, Very Hungry Caterpillar
Climate change will mean more insects, and less food for humans.
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NASA Space Art Is Causing a Ruckus Among Astronomers
The line between culture and clutter can be hard to trace, even hundreds of miles above Earth.
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Steve Gschmeissner / Science Photo Library / Getty The Patients Who Don't Want to Be Cured
A hemophiliac says his genetic disorder is part of his identity, and therapies like CRISPR threaten to erase it.
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U.S. National Library of Medicine The 'Poison Squad' That Shook America’s Faith in Preservatives
In the U.S., chemicals like borax were common in foods from bacon to margarine, until a shocking series of experiments revealed their toxic effects.
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Jonathan Ernst / Reuters The Global Rightward Shift on Climate Change
President Trump may be leading the rich, English-speaking world to scale back environmental policies.
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Keith A. Ellenbogen / AP When Conservation Backfires
Ironically, the creation of huge marine reserves can temporarily worsen the problems they are designed to address.
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Wade Payne / AP Naked-Mole-Rat Queens Control Their Subjects by Having Them Eat Poop
Feces turn subordinates into better caretakers for the colony’s pups.
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Joe Raedle / Getty Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies
So why can't the journals that publish them?
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Joao Paulo Burini / Getty The Revolution That Rewrote Life’s History
Your high-school biology book needs an update.
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Enrique Shore / Reuters How Disease and Conquest Carved a New Planetary Landscape
Migration and a global shipping network have flattened biodiversity worldwide.
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Juliane Zeidler Fog Is Full of Microbes
“A fog droplet isn’t a bad environment to live in"
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Jordan Edgcomb / AP Ozone Is Dropping—Except in the Rural West
Drilling for oil and gas may be to blame.
