World-famous Houston surgeon Bud Frazier spent decades developing a revolutionary device that could save millions of lives.

On the ubiquity of forest fires.

Almond growing in California is a $7.6 billion industry that wouldn’t be possible without the 30 billion bees (and hundreds of human beekeepers) who keep the trees pollinated — and whose very existence is in peril.

The debate over what really killed the dinosaurs is still raging.

At a South Korean laboratory, a once-disgraced doctor is replicating hundreds of deceased pets for the rich and famous.

Drought, dread, and family in the American Southwest.

The Berkeley Pit is a gorgeous, toxic former mining site in Montana that’s beloved by tourists. But unless it’s cleaned up soon, it could become the worst environmental disaster in American history.

We knew everything we needed to know, and nothing stood in our way. Nothing, that is, except ourselves.

We know more about sleep than we ever have and we’ve never been worse at it.

Thirty-four years after the Bhopal gas leak, the abandoned waste pits are spreading poison and still destroying lives.

A pre-eminent expert on large carnivores runs afoul of the enemies of the wolf.

Could a global icon of extinction still be alive?

When the people of Flint, Michigan, complained that their tap water smelled bad and made children sick, it took officials 18 months to accept there was a problem.

On fireworks, and the “pyros” who practice the art.

Discovering why we hurt.

A history of modern capitalism from the perspective of the straw.

The author survives a bite by a venomous snake in a remote area of Yosemite National Park.

My leg, from toe to hip, turned black and yellow and eventually swelled to 24 inches, more than twice its normal circumference.

Joe Howlett gave his life to save an animal that may already be past the point of no return. After ten centuries of annihilation, is there any way to undo the damage done?

On the frontlines of extinction in the Gulf of California, where the vaquita faces its final days.

The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risks continue to multiply. Much worse is coming.

Is this the world’s most bizarre scholarly meeting?

The author on his reverence for water.

The journey of a river from source to mouth resembles our own journey from birth to death, an analogy oft remarked, and yet the beginnings and endings of rivers are as fictional as those we impose on stories. There are headwaters to headwaters and no river ever really ends.

What a burgeoning movement says about science, solace, and how a theory becomes truth.

Burt Dorman says that the scientific mainstream missed the chance to wipe out AIDS and save the lives of 35 million people. Now he wants another try.

Engineer and adventurer Richard Jenkins has made oceangoing robots that could revolutionize fishing, drilling, and environmental science. His aim: a thousand of them.