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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Evan Vucci / AP / Angela He / ... Mike Pence’s Outer-Space Gospel
The vice president’s speeches about space sometimes sound like sermons. They draw on a long tradition of evangelical thinking about cosmic exploration.
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NASA / Reuters Hawaii’s Biggest Hurricane Threat in More Than Two Decades
“I’ve not seen such dramatic changes in the forecast track as I’ve seen with this storm.”
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Thomas Higham / University of Oxford Scientists Stunned by a Neanderthal Hybrid Discovered in a Siberian Cave
The extraordinary find is rewriting the story of archaic and modern humans.
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A Treacherous, Ill-Fated Expedition to Antarctica
Despite never successfully reaching the South Pole, Sir Ernest Shackleton’s observations on the continent resound.
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Brandon Martin / Rice University The Parasitic Vine That Slowly Sucks the Life Out of Wasps
“Pretty freaky”
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Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty What If a Female CEO Acted Like Elon Musk?
The Tesla CEO’s tearful New York Times interview reveals a lot about the double standards men and women face.
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David Duprey / AP How Much of an Herbicide Is Safe in Your Cereal?
The debate is vicious around glyphosate, which was recently found in several breakfast favorites.
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Reuters An Asteroid Named Aretha
The Queen of Soul’s legacy can be found even among the cosmos.
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Pascal Rossignol / Reuters Scientists Finally Crack Wheat’s Absurdly Complex Genome
Their efforts will make it much easier to breed new varieties of the world’s most important crop.
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Eliana Aponte / Reuters Colombia’s Long Push to Bring ‘Loaned’ Fossils Home
Latin American countries have larger capacities than ever to house locally discovered specimens, but many are still held abroad.
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Elaine Thompson / AP Will Washington State Voters Make History on Climate Change?
The state could be the first in the union to adopt a carbon price by ballot.
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Radu Sigheti / Reuters Elephants Have a Secret Weapon Against Cancer
The biggest animals should have the highest risks of developing tumors, but they don’t.
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DircinhaSW / Getty / Angela He / The ... How Jell-O Got Its Bounce
The dessert was once as high status as it is squishy.
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Chase Dekker Wild-Life Images / Getty What a Grieving Orca Tells Us
People know a famous community of killer whales as individuals, with their own names, families, and personalities—which has made their woes even harder to take.
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Maciej Rebisz / Quanta Magazine The Universe as We Understand It May Be Impossible
A new conjecture in physics challenges the leading “theory of everything.”
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Is the Dinosaur-Apocalypse Story Wrong?
Most children are taught dinosaurs went extinct due to an asteroid that collided with Earth. Now, some scientists disagree.
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Robyn Beck / AFP / Getty Why the Wildfires of 2018 Have Been So Ferocious
It’s the heat, not the humidity.
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NASA / Reuters It’s Easier to Leave the Solar System Than to Reach the Sun
The center of the solar system is a tricky destination, but NASA is going.
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Lee Celano / Reuters Dude, She’s (Exactly 25 Percent) Out of Your League
A massive new study of online dating finds that everyone dates aspirationally—and that a woman’s desirability peaks 32 years before a man’s does.
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Denise Nestor The Nastiest Feud in Science
A Princeton geologist has endured decades of ridicule for arguing that the fifth extinction was caused not by an asteroid but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions. But she’s reopened that debate.
