Science

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…

Deep in a maze of tunnels, a single female runs the whole operation. She is the only naked mole-rat in her colony who breeds. The dozens of other females around her, her daughters and sisters, live…

Watch a group of apes just before the food arrives, and you can feel the room tighten. Bananas or sugarcane are about to land in the middle of a hierarchy, and everyone knows it. In those loaded…

A fire needs three things: heat, oxygen and fuel. Cut off any one and it dies. What made the end-Triassic so catastrophic, a new study argues, is that the landscape kept regrowing its own fuel, fast…

Walk any tide line today and you will find the arrangement everywhere: a hermit crab in a borrowed shell, worms and sponges crusting the inside of an abandoned whelk, a whole small economy built…