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A fossil tells you that an animal lived. What it rarely tells you is what happened in the days and weeks after it died: the messy, crowded interval before burial, when a carcass becomes an ecosystem…
For a long time, Shimao was a puzzle sitting in plain sight. Rising in what is now northern Shaanxi Province about 4,000 years ago, it sprawled across roughly four square kilometers behind massive…
The striking thing about psychedelics, clinically, is how long a single afternoon seems to last. A person takes one dose, spends a few hours somewhere strange, and reports feeling different for…
The headline you may have seen this week almost writes itself: lab-grown sperm. It is worth resisting, because the cells that a University of Pennsylvania team actually grew are not sperm. They are…
A bacterium has no nervous system and no hormones, and it still knows when it is drowning in sodium. Part of how it knows is a piece of its own messenger RNA, folded into a pocket that closes around…
Left alone, pure water is remarkably reluctant to freeze. A clean droplet can be chilled to about −38 °C before it turns to ice by itself. Clouds do not wait that long, because the air is full of…
In 1950, a lake called Jancarurish, high in Peru's Cordillera Blanca, broke through the ridge of loose rock holding it back and emptied down the valley. An aerial survey photograph kept by the water…
The Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves are the two largest floating slabs of ice on the planet, and by the usual reading they are the least troubled. Their summers are cold, their surfaces stay…
Draw every known rocky planet on one chart, how hard its star bakes it, against how firmly its gravity holds on, and a line appears. Below the line, worlds keep an atmosphere. Above it, they are…
Line up the rocky part of Earth against the Sun, element for element, and most of the list matches. Then you reach the elements that boil off easily, the ones that need somewhere cool and quiet to…
In a humid forest of conifers and ferns, in what is now Inner Mongolia, the loudest thing in the undergrowth may have been an animal no human ear could have picked up. Its song was made by scraping…
Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…