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Borderline personality disorder is one of the most stigmatized diagnoses in psychiatry, and one of the least often described in terms of biology. People living with it experience intense, unstable…
A little before nine in the morning, the seafloor off southern Mexico lurched. Within minutes the U.S. Geological Survey had a magnitude, a location, and an automated damage forecast on the wire; a…
An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…
Every atom carries a kind of birth certificate. The exact mix of heavier and lighter versions of an element, its isotopes, is set by where and when that material was forged, and it barely changes…
The place where most of Earth's surface is made lies kilometres underwater, in near-total darkness, along a seam that winds around the planet like the stitching on a baseball. Mid-ocean ridges are…
Set a bowling ball spinning in the middle of a trampoline and, in Einstein's universe, it does more than sag the surface — it twists it, winding the fabric around like a spoon in honey. General…
Every flood map carries a quiet assumption: that the future's worst storm will look something like the past's. Engineers size a levee or price an insurance policy against a "one-in-100-year" event,…
In September 2017, a single subatomic particle ended a several-kilometre journey deep in the Antarctic ice and set off the detectors of the IceCube observatory. Tracing its path backward across the…
Picture a cloud of specks too small to see without a microscope, drifting through a maze of obstacles none of them has ever encountered. No one is at the joystick. The specks fan out, squeeze through…