Science

The first clue was almost nothing. In 2008, a photograph taken on the east bank of the Lomami River in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed a black monkey with a strange, bright detail: orange…

Every asteroid carries a birth certificate, if you know where to look for it. It is written not in shape or size but in isotopes, the slightly different weights of the same chemical element, mixed in…

Inside the nucleus of a healthy human cell sit a handful of droplets so small they were only named this century. They have no membrane. They condense out of the surrounding soup the way oil beads in…

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…

Nothing in the apparatus actually spins. That is the first surprise, and the one that makes the rest of the story hang together. Sitting on a bench at the City University of New York's Advanced…

For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for ordinary matter to exist. Protons and neutrons had not formed; instead, their constituents, quarks and gluons,…

Every clock is, at heart, a thing that ticks at a rate you can count on. A pendulum swings; a quartz crystal vibrates; in the best atomic clocks, electrons jump between two energy levels exactly so…

The usual story about antibiotic resistance ends with a plea for new drugs, and the pipeline for those is famously thin. A study out of two American labs points at a different move: not inventing a…

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…