Scientifically Proven Sources of Sex Appeal
Beards, scars, red clothes, and other secrets of attraction
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Projects
Life Up Close
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Cornelia Li The Human Cost of Amber
Fossils preserved in sap offer an astonishingly clear view of the distant past, but they come at a high price.
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Robert F. Bukaty / AP The Fishy Science of Omega-3s
Twenty thousand papers later, researchers are still debating whether the fatty acid is all it’s cracked up to be.
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Awanish Tirkey / Shutterstock The Mystery of ‘Skeleton Lake’ Gets Deeper
Hundreds of skeletons are scattered around a site high in the Himalayas, and a new study overturns a leading theory about how they got there.
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Emily Osterloff / National History Museum What Fossils Alone Can’t Explain About Dinosaurs
When time is measured in 10-million-year blocks, the lines between ecosystems and animals that would never have coexisted can get blurry.
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Science Photo Library A Tissue Sample From 1966 Held Traces of Early HIV
To understand the virus’s history, a team worked to reconstruct its genome from a time before anyone knew the virus existed.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters Trump Is Thinking of Buying a Giant Socialist Island
The president has reportedly expressed interest in acquiring Greenland for the United States.
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NASA / JPL The Aging Spacecraft of Deep Space
NASA is rationing watts to keep its oldest mission going.
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Ilya Naymushin / Reuters A Worrisome Discovery in High Arctic Snowfall
Snow from the Far North can contain thousands of particles of microplastic, a new study finds.
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MB Photography / Getty Dingoes Have Created a Scientific Rift
Is classifying the wild dog as a species good strategy or bad practice?
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Ricky Kresslein / Getty Lyme Disease Is Baffling, Even to Experts
But new insights are at last accumulating.
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Sheila Patek One Giant Leap for Maggotkind
Even the squishy can make great bounds.
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VINCENZO PINTO / Getty Images An Italian Volcano Turned Out to Be a Fraud
“There’s just no evidence we can see that this was ever a volcano.”
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Stuart Gleave / Getty The Anthropocene Is a Joke
On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch.
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Juhari Muhade / Getty A New Clue to How Life Originated
A long-standing mystery about early cells has a solution—and it’s a rather magical one.
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Peter Andrews / Reuters A Promising Resource for Cancer Breakthroughs Is Dying Out
As humans drive vulnerable mammals closer to extinction, valuable mutations hidden in their DNA could be bred out of existence.
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Patryk Hardziej / Quanta Magazine The Dispute at the Heart of Cosmology
The universe is expanding, but no one can agree on exactly how fast.
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NASA Jupiter’s Great Red Spot Is Behaving Strangely
For a time, it looked as though the planet’s defining feature might be on the verge of extinction.
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Brook Mitchell / Getty This Land Is the Only Land There Is
Here are seven ways of understanding the IPCC’s newest climate warning.
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Kim Kyung Hoon, Reuters Some Fish Are Still Full of Mercury, for a Worrying Reason
Emissions of mercury have declined, but levels in fish could still increase thanks to overfishing and a changing climate.
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P. Ravikumar / Reuters Why a 7-Year-Old Had 547 Teeth
Sometimes stem cells in the jaw don’t work quite like they’re supposed to.
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Courtesy of DoubleTree by Hilton The Great NASA Bake-Off
High-tech agriculture would keep far-flung astronauts alive, but making something delicious would keep them happy.
