The next time you thank your lucky stars, you might want to bless the binaries. New calculations indicate that a massive star whose outer layer…
It’s hard to imagine what Earth might look like in 2500. But a collaboration between science and art is offering an unsettling window into how…
Reddit is a popular social media site with over 430 million active users worldwide. The website has forums called subreddits on nearly every subject including…
Over decades, centuries and millennia, the steady skyward climb of redwoods, the tangled march of mangroves along tropical coasts and the slow submersion of carbon-rich…
Scattered across a swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile lie twisted chunks of black and green glass. How the glass ended up there, sprinkled…
Life as We Made ItBeth ShapiroBasic Books, $30 With genetic engineering, humans have recently unleashed a surreal fantasia: pigs that excrete less environment-polluting phosphorus, ducklings…
It started with polar bears. In 2012, polar bear DNA revealed that the iconic species had faced extinction before, likely during a warm period 130,000…
For centuries, researchers have puzzled over how oysters grow stunningly symmetrical, perfectly round pearls around irregularly shaped grains of sand or bits of debris. Now…
In a remote corner of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, researchers have spent decades catching and measuring birds in a large swath of forest unmarred by roads…
When it comes to knowing what actually lies deep inside the Earth, diamonds are a geologist’s best friend. A tiny bit of rock trapped inside…