Science

Picture an ant trying to walk a trail while a herd of elephants stampedes down the same path. That is roughly the problem Prem Kumar and his group at Northwestern set themselves, and the ant,…

The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…

Give the same aerial imagery to two dozen geologists, ask them all to trace the active faults, and you might expect the answers to converge, especially the ones from decades-hardened professionals.…

Every step you take sends a small pulse of energy into the ground. It is far too weak to feel, and normally far too weak to bother with. But run a fibre-optic cable along the street and watch it…

A volcano does not have to be quiet just because it is underwater. It bubbles, hisses, and occasionally coughs, and all of that makes sound. Sound travels well through water, better in many ways than…

In the Brazilian savanna a capuchin monkey climbs onto a flat block of stone with a palm nut in one hand. It sets the nut down, picks up a second stone, raises it above its head with both arms, and…

The dream repeats. For many people with post-traumatic stress disorder it is the same dream, most nights, for years, and the exhaustion it produces feeds back into everything else: the depression,…

No seismometer has ever recorded a great earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The fault runs offshore from northern California to British Columbia, and the last time it broke along most of its…

The whole trick of super-resolution microscopy is a kind of accounting. You cannot see a fluorescent molecule; you can only see the smeared blob of light it throws onto a camera, and that blob is…

In 1991 the Medical Research Council stopped a trial early. Women who had already carried one pregnancy affected by a neural tube defect were given either folic acid or a placebo before trying to…

Haiyan is over. It came ashore in the Philippines in November 2013, and what it did there is a matter of record. But a storm that has finished happening can be made to happen again, which is the…

Pull on a rubber band and nothing interesting happens at the molecular level; the chains just uncoil. The materials described in a new paper answer force with a decision. The building blocks are…