In 2007, on a fine summer day in rural Austria, a flock of northern bald ibises followed two paraplanes, gondolas with prop engines, held aloft by yellow and blue parachutes. Although…

If anyone living in the village of Möggingen, Germany, had taken a close look at a bumblebee in the summer of 2009, they might have noticed something a little strange. Some of the…

Back in January, science news was abuzz with reports that the lowly dung-beetle—shellacked trundler of balled-up excreta, stuck with one of nature’s least glamorous jobs—used…

There’s no doubt that the climate in many parts of the planet is changing quickly. The planet is getting hotter, sea levels are rising, storms are intensifying, many lands are drying…

In 2008, my 19-year-old daughter, Danielle, took the same type of DNA test for breast and ovarian cancer that actress Angelina Jolie took recently.Jolie, 38, came out positive and…

Take a look at a butterfly’s wing, and you can learn a lesson about life. Not that it’s beautiful, or fragile, or too easily appreciated only when it’s fading—though all that…

When looking at the “Nutrition Facts” label on a package of food, the familiar Helvetica text laid out according to the FDA’s exacting specifications, you could easily…

It’s easy to think of our cells’ inner workings as parts in a well-oiled machine—like tiny crankshafts and gears they chug along in their endless task of transcribing information…

When President Obama delivered a speech at MIT in 2009, he used a common science metaphor: “We have always been about innovation,” he said. “We have always been about discovery.…

It has recently become clear that each one of us is more microbe than human—at least when it comes to the number of cells in our bodies. The bacteria that swarm through our guts,…