Science

Spider fangs do not look like they should have a fossil record. They are delicate, hollow and mostly made of the kind of soft tissue that rots long before it can turn to stone. So the question of…

In quantum technology, sometimes the most valuable thing in a material is a flaw. The most famous example lives in diamond, where a missing carbon atom paired with a nitrogen atom creates a defect…

In the airless mud of a river near Libreville, in Gabon, a single cell keeps finding its way down. It is a ciliate: a fringe of beating hairs, a nucleus, the sort of organism a high-school microscope…

In the Botanical Garden of the University of Potsdam grows a South African plant called Wachendorfia thyrsiflora, the butterfly lily. Look into one of its yellow flowers and you find a small…

The evidence is a single lower jaw. It is robust, set with unusually large canine and premolar teeth and molars whose chewing surfaces are rounded and heavily textured, the kind of teeth suited to a…

For the family of the older child, the milestone was not measured in laboratory readouts. It was watching a 14-year-old, after years of severe seizures and developmental delay, get up and walk across…

Teflon is famous for the things that will not stick to it. Eggs slide off the pan; water beads and runs. That same slipperiness makes polytetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE, a nightmare to glue. Its…

Ask any first-year chemistry student to sketch a triple bond and you will get the same tidy answer: one sigma bond running straight down the axis between two atoms, wrapped by two pi bonds above and…

Open almost any biology textbook to the chapter on photosynthesis and you will meet the same diagram. Light hits a green cell and its energy runs down a chain built from two linked machines,…

For years, the perovskite polariton laser has had an awkward secret: to make it shine, you had to shine another laser at it. That is not a small caveat. A laser you can only switch on with a second,…

Step into a rainforest and the soundscape can feel infinite, thousands of species layering whistles, buzzes, and rippling phrases into a wall of noise. That impression of endless variety is, in a…

Ancient DNA is a discipline built on luck. It survives best in cold, dry, stable ground, which is why so much of what we know about deep human history comes from Europe and northern Asia. Japan, warm…