Life on Earth is far stranger, more flexible, and more inventive than most of us were ever taught in school. In the last few decades, biologists have uncovered organisms that rewrite the rules of aging, communication systems that work without nerves or voices, and genes that behave more like software patches than fixed blueprints. ...
We walk around inside one of the most complex systems in the known universe, yet even in 2025 scientists are still baffled by some of the most basic things our bodies do. Brain scanners, genetic sequencing, and precision microscopes have pulled back layer after layer of mystery, but under every solved puzzle, another one ...
You’ve probably gazed at an ancient tree and wondered what stories it could tell, yet you might not realize that some of the organisms around you have been quietly thriving for thousands of years. Methuselah, a Great Basin bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva) in the White Mountains of California, has been measured by ring count to ...
The mountains of Oregon have a way of keeping secrets, but this one towers over the rest: living trees that germinated before the first European maps sketched the Pacific Northwest. Biologists, armed with corers and careful field notes, have verified several giants at roughly five centuries old, their rings stacked like silent annals of ...
There’s a moment – half gasp, half awe – when a cat slips and time seems to stretch. The animal tumbles, twists, and somehow touches down with a soft thud, eyes bright, dignity intact. For more than a century, that miracle has teased physicists and veterinarians alike: how does a cat flip in midair ...
On a damp night when the mountains draw their curtains of fog, a team of biologists switched off their headlamps and watched the rock ceiling bloom into a quiet galaxy. The points of light were not stars, but glow worm larvae scattered across limestone like sparks from a hidden forge. The discovery reframes a ...
It sounds like a fable, but the protagonist is real: a pinhead-sized jellyfish capable of turning back its biological clock. Scientists call it Turritopsis dohrnii, better known as the so‑called immortal jellyfish, and it can revert from adulthood to its juvenile state when life gets rough. That trick doesn’t just dodge death; it rewrites what ...
