Science
Mapping Creativity in the Brain
New research sheds some light on the neuroscience of improvising.
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Projects
What's the Best Planet?
NASA Venus, the Best and Brightest
A historian makes the case for Earth’s closest neighbor.
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Randall Hyman Floating in the Arctic Darkness
From a boat in a remote Norwegian fjord, researchers are studying how marine life can survive over long winters with no sunlight.
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NASA / Reuters Clouds Might Ruin Our Chance to Spot Extraterrestrial Life
And not the ones in Earth's skies.
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John Gentner / AP The Violent Remaking of Appalachia
When mining a century’s worth of energy means ruining a landscape for millions of years.
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Peter DaSilva / Quanta Simulating the Origins of Life
One biochemist is recreating the conditions that may have caused the rise of the planet’s first organisms.
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ESA The World's Most Urgent Science Project
To know the Earth’s future, you must first know its past.
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Robinson Meyer / The Atlantic What Good Is a Library Full of Dead Plants?
How 19th century scientists anticipated the data revolution
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Elizabeth Preston Eating Iguana at the Explorers Club
The exclusive annual dinner hosted by a legendary society of scientists is for adventurous eaters only.
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Jacky Naegelen / Reuters How a Distant Ancestor's DNA Helps Reveal What Makes Us Human
Modern Melanesians share genes with Denisovans, but it’s the missing ones that are most telling.
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James St. John / Flickr The Weird Stories Behind America's Official State Fossils
From fights with creationists to dinosaurs that might not exist
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Michael Haegele / Corbis Lean In to Crying at Work
Looking down on people who cry at work is sexist. It’s time to bring back the noble art of public weeping.
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Fred Bavendam / Minden Pictures / Corbis The Quest to Save Coral Reefs
With some of the world’s richest ecosystems hanging in the balance, scientists are turning to technologies like 3-D printing.
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Sean McMahon / Yale University Solving the Mystery of the Tully Monster
A weird creature with hammerhead eyes and a claw face finally gets a place on the tree of life.
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Tom License / CityLab Digging for Historical Clues in Victorian Garbage
One person’s trash is another person's insight into 19th-century life.
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Murad Sezer / Reuters The Plagues That Might Have Brought Down the Roman Empire
Bioarcheologists are getting better at measuring the toll of ancient pathogens.
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Orbital View: The Increasingly Melting Artic
This Arctic is not Roald Amundsen’s Arctic: Arctic sea ice reaches its…
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Olena Shmahalo / Quanta Magazine Fixing a Broken Theory of Nature
Scientists are trying to tweak a well-known model of ecological change to account for environmental fluctuations.
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America by Air: An Existential Threat in Alaska
Just when I think the series is coming to a close, we get an especially great email from a reader…
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Finbarr O'Reilly / Reuters Bonobos Just Want Everyone to Get Along
New research suggests that unlike humans, the peaceful primates pay more attention to bonding opportunities than they do to threats.
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Kevin Sanders What Causes These Mysterious Fairy Circles?
For decades, scientists have puzzled over bizarre circles in the Namibian landscape. Now, they’ve found more in Australia.
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Mini Object Lesson: Our Reactor in the Sky
The Monday after Daylight Savings Time starts is a drag. Students nod off in morning classes while bleary-eyed teachers clutch…