The Denisovans, a deeply mysterious branch of the human family tree, have obsessed researchers across the globe for decades. Except for a finger bone discovered in Siberia, some teeth found in Tibet, and strands of DNA found in modern humans, they were virtually unknown. Now, an astonishing discovery in the form of a jawbone found ...
The world’s rainforests are not just the most significant carbon stores on the planet and safe places for biodiversity, but with the current rate of deforestation, they are being lost at an unprecedented pace. In 2024, almost 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) of a primeval forest in an area almost the size of Panama ...
Physicists have quietly been rewriting what time is, and the picture that’s emerging looks nothing like the ticking-arrow metaphor most of us carry around in our heads. Instead of a universal flow marching everything from past to future, time is starting to look more like something built from relationships, information, and perspective. Recent work in ...
It’s every traveler’s worst nightmare: a flight takes off, something goes terribly wrong, and suddenly you’re hurtling toward disaster with precious little time to react. That fear moved two engineers in India to propose something bold: what if, just before a crash, an airplane could wrap itself in airbags? Not just the tiny ones in ...
On hot evenings in mosquito season, public-health crews move quietly along canals and neglected pools, releasing tiny, silver-gray fish that might change the odds in our favor. Mosquito fish – humble livebearers no longer than a finger – have been drafted into a global campaign to shrink the swarms that carry West Nile virus, dengue, ...
Two millennia ago, a Roman encyclopedist tried to catalog everything in nature, from thunder to tigers. He had no idea that some of the “monsters” he described might echo creatures that lived tens of millions of years earlier. The mystery sits at the crossroads of myth and science: when ancient readers met dragons and giants ...
On certain windless mornings high on the Bolivian Altiplano, the ground seems to vanish and the sky doubles in size. People walking across the Salar de Uyuni appear to float between two horizons, as if gravity has briefly forgotten which way is down. This is not a camera trick or a tourist filter but a ...
Across the rugged landscapes of North America, a remarkable ecological story is unfolding. Mountain lions, also known as cougars, pumas, or panthers, are reclaiming territories they haven’t inhabited for over a century. These elusive big cats, once pushed to the brink in many regions by hunting and habitat loss, are demonstrating remarkable resilience and adaptability. ...
The ocean is 71% of Earth’s surface, moderates our climate and feeds billions of us yet it is in trouble. Overfishing, plastic pollution and rising temperatures are driving marine ecosystems to the brink. The onus falls on the next month’s U.N. Ocean Conference in Nice, France, to be a turning point where all nations look these crises in ...
Picture the closing chapters of the Cretaceous, when shorelines were louder, skies busier, and the largest flying animals ever known prowled like herons with skyscraper wings. The puzzle scientists are still piecing together is how such giants rose from the ground, hunted, and survived in a world already tipping toward catastrophe. New analyses of fossil ...
