Science

For decades, the story of Alzheimer's has been told from the outside in: sticky plaques between neurons, tangled fibers within them, a slow siege on the brain's wiring. But the plaques and tangles…

Stand anywhere on the Tibetan Plateau and the word that comes to mind is flat: a cold, thin-aired tableland averaging more than 4,500 metres above sea level, earning its nickname as the Roof of the…

Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…

The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…

Nobody has ever put a thermometer 5,000 kilometers down. The temperature at Earth's center is inferred, not measured, and one of the load-bearing numbers behind that inference is the melting point of…

Energy inside molecules does not simply teleport from one place to the next. It has to be carried, and some kinds of energy are far harder to carry than others. The stubborn case is the "triplet," a…

A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…

At 854 metres up in the southern Norwegian mountains, Lake Tesse holds a puzzle that has nothing to do with how the fish got caught and everything to do with how they got there at all. When the ice…

Stretch a rubber band and it eventually snaps. Pour honey and it just keeps flowing, however hard you pull. That contrast is one of the first things anyone learns about matter: solids can fracture,…

Green tree ants are not the kind of prey most spiders go looking for. They swarm, they bite, they spray formic acid, and they coordinate. A spider that tried to wrestle one into a web would, more…

Watch a fruit fly hover over a bowl of ripe peaches, then a crane fly stumble across a windowpane, then a midge hang in a cloud at dusk. They look like utterly different aviators: different sizes,…

Some 5,500 years ago, on the banks of a river that feeds Lake Baikal in southeast Siberia, small bands of hunter-gatherers began burying their dead in unusual numbers, and the dead were unusually…