Science

At 4:51 a.m. on Saturday, some North Islanders got a few seconds of notice that most earthquakes never give. Their phones buzzed loudly, overriding silent mode, a heartbeat before the ground began to…

The brain runs on roughly the wattage of a dim light bulb. A large AI model can draw the output of a small power plant. That gap is the quiet motivation behind a whole field of research, and behind a…

Snakes are a paradox of the fossil record. There are more than 4,000 species alive today, slithering through deserts, rivers, treetops and soil on every continent but Antarctica, one of evolution's…

The lesions were the easy part. For more than a decade, biologists had watched brown bullhead catfish in Lake Memphremagog turn up with patches of blackened, malignant skin; by 2014, nearly one in…

In a volcanic corner of northeastern Catalonia, a good deal of the local disaster history had never lived in any single place. Some of it sat in government seismic catalogues. Some was buried in a…

Borderline personality disorder is one of the most stigmatized diagnoses in psychiatry, and one of the least often described in terms of biology. People living with it experience intense, unstable…

An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…

The place where most of Earth's surface is made lies kilometres underwater, in near-total darkness, along a seam that winds around the planet like the stitching on a baseball. Mid-ocean ridges are…

Set a bowling ball spinning in the middle of a trampoline and, in Einstein's universe, it does more than sag the surface — it twists it, winding the fabric around like a spoon in honey. General…