“It is a beautiful hand: strong, with long, slender fingers and smooth skin, its nails ridgeless and pink. If you didn’t know Jonathan Koch—if you first met him, say, on the courts at the Calabasas Tennis & Swim Club—you might not suspect that his hand previously belonged to someone else.”
Throughout 2020, the notion that the novel coronavirus leaked from a lab was off-limits. Those who dared to push for transparency say toxic politics and hidden agendas kept us in the dark.
A study of resilience in does and other female creatures.
The clock is a useful social tool, but it is also deeply political: It benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of our own bodies and the world around us.
Climate change is bringing tourism and tension to Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard.
Finding meaning in the climate fight.
Mo Pinel spent a career reshaping the ball’s inner core to harness the power of physics. He revolutionized the sport—and spared no critics along the way.
A recent raid in Italy involving rare Chilean species highlights the growing scale of a black market in the thorny plants.
Droplets v. aerosols.
On fungi.
What the sensation of uncontrollable itch and the phantom limbs of amputees can tell us about how the brain works.
Inside the race to eliminate one of nature’s biggest threats.
A century of research has demonstrated how poverty and discrimination drive disease. Can COVID push science to finally address the issue?
The Massachusetts Audubon Society has managed its land as wildlife habitat for years. Here’s how the carbon credits it sold may have fueled climate change.
For centuries, dowsers have claimed the ability to find groundwater, precious metals, and other quarry using divining rods and an uncanny intuition. Is it the real deal or woo-woo?
Deer can regrow their antlers, and humans can replace their liver. What else might be possible?
Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered—but so did activism.
New research is intensifying the debate — with profound implications for the future of the planet.
The extraordinary story of two Pacific voyages of discovery a thousand years apart.
Her home still wrecked months after a freak storm, an Iowa woman’s FEMA ordeal presages the turmoil ahead as climate disasters worsen.
Sewage epidemiology has been embraced in other countries for decades, but not in America. Will Covid change that?
Should humans try harder to protect even wild creatures from predators and disease? Should we care whether they live good lives? Some philosophers and scientists have an unorthodox answer.
On the questions DNA tests answer and the new ones they create.
The story of the loneliest whale in the world.
Birds do it. Bees do it. Learning about the astounding navigational feats of wild creatures can teach us a lot about where we’re going.
