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A mouse dies in the leaf litter of a northern European wood, and within a few hours a pair of burying beetles has found it. They work through the night. The two of them drag the body down into the…
You get talking to two people you have never met before, and within a few minutes the three of you discover you all know the same person. The ordinary reaction is that the world is small. A paper…
A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, and for chemistry it is the natural unit: atoms in a molecule take tens or hundreds of femtoseconds to rearrange. Electrons are quicker. They…
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…
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…
El Nino is famously a creature of the calendar. It flares roughly every two to seven years, tips global weather off its usual paths for a season or two, and fades. Ask what it does to the world's…
The message goes out at two in the morning, to the one thing that always answers. Not a friend, not a crisis line: a chatbot. It replies in seconds, never sounds tired, and does not judge. That is a…
A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…