Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Neither animal, plant, fungus nor familiar protozoan, a strange microbe that sits in its own “supra-kingdom”…

Rosalinda Roberts had gotten used to seeing weird shapes in the brain. Over three decades of looking at brain tissue under an electron microscope, she’d regularly come across “unknown…

Driving down a grid road in central Saskatchewan, a machine that looks like a giant insect approaches me in a cloud of dust. The cab, hanging 8 feet above the road, is suspended by…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Two years ago, scientists announced that they had found evidence of life in 3.7-billion-year-old rocks, suggesting…

Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s…

Every time Jim meets a patient, he cries,” Padmanee said to The New York Times in 2016. “Well not every time,” Jim added. Jim Allison and Padmanee Sharma work together at the…

When you walk in a tropical forest, the sheer abundance and variety of life can have a powerful and somewhat disorienting effect.Painting by Caspar David Friedrich (circa 1820-1821)…

On March 3, 1942, a brief item with a rather peculiar headline appeared tucked away in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper. “Fledermaus No Longer!” the bold letters proclaimed. The…

We are at the midpoint of our journey. Seth twists the key, turning the truck ignition off, and we step out and walk the few remaining feet to Tong’s Tiki Hut. The aroma of cooked…

This story was originally published by Knowable Magazine.When entomologist Barrett Klein talks to people about his research on honeybee sleep, the conversations follow a predictable…