To deal with climate change and power the cars of tomorrow, we’ll have to solve the cobalt problem.

The elegant science of turning cadavers into compost.

Meditations on the myth of the voiceless.

The behavior geneticist Kathryn Paige Harden is waging a two-front campaign: on her left are those who assume that genes are irrelevant, on her right those who insist that they’re everything.

Did people first come to this continent by land or by sea?

Inside the political battle over reproductive rights in Texas a decade ago.

“There is no hierarchy in the web of life.”

About 100 miles from Galveston, Flower Garden Banks is home to some of the healthiest coral communities in the world. Some unlikely allies came together to help expand protections, but will it be enough?

Today, artificial intelligence and information technologies have absorbed many of the questions that were once taken up by theologians and philosophers: the mind’s relationship to the body, the question of free will, the possibility of immortality.

The quest to create a cheap, durable, clean stove for the masses.

Drought is shrinking one of the country’s largest reservoirs, revealing a hidden Eden.

How a landscape architect is enlisting nature to defend our coastal cities against climate change—and doing it on the cheap.

The industry that fights bed bugs is growing, but the only real winners are the pests themselves.

Smell is often dismissed as the least important sense. But it’s the funk that draws us together.

Conservationists saw the 6-year-old brown bear as a symbol of hope. Villagers saw him as a menace. Then he turned up dead.

Indigenous water protectors face off with an oil company and police over a Minnesota pipeline.

Inside the world of competitive fireworks.

We’re totally unprepared for what’s to come.

“It’s basically bankruptcy for profit.”

We’ve barely explored the darkest realm of the ocean. With rare-metal mining on the rise, we’re already destroying it.

Residents have lived near more than 100 massive petroleum storage tanks for decades, never really knowing if they’re breathing in dangerous chemicals. Now they’re fighting to find out.

The rush to find a conspiracy around the COVID-19 pandemic’s origins is driven by narrative, not evidence.

Last year’s first-ever fatal shark attack jolted Mainers into acknowledging that great whites regularly swim off the state’s shores—and that there’s plenty about them we don’t know.

“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.