How Sleep Cleans the Brain
A fresh look at your nightly brainwashing
Can Plants Count?
It seems as though they can at least track the number of events in their environment
Making AI More Human
An interview with Berkeley researcher and author Nina Begus about her new book and proposal to fuse science and the humanities
Why Seals Twitch Their Whiskers
And the trade-offs inherent to every twitch
The Students Who Believe Practice Makes Perfect Get Pretty Perfect Grades
There’s a reason it’s a popular aphorism
Latest Stories
The Big-Game Elephants Neanderthals Hunted for Food
A prehistoric butcher bonanza uncovered on an ancient German lakeshore
A Very Unscientific History of Scientific Hoaxes
The past, present, and future of academic deception
Who Gets to Do Science?
An interview with a neuroscientist who spent the last decade tearing down the class, race, and language barriers that keep people like him out of research
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Cutting-edge science, unraveled by the brightest living thinkers.
Astronomy
See more AstronomyHubble Snaps a New Dazzling Photo of the Crab Nebula
It was formed by an explosion witnessed around the world almost a millennium ago
The Search for Alien Life Just Identified 45 New Targets
This subset of exoplanets are the most likely to be habitable
History
See more HistoryThe Martyrs, Hunters, and Nature Lovers Who Came Together to Save Birds
An interview with James McCommons, author of The Feather Wars, about the past and future of bird conservation
How Three Students Designed an Atomic Bomb
A top-secret 1960s project tasked physics postdocs with building The Bomb
The Thrill of Science in 2042
A science historian explains how science got its groove back. A fictional dispatch from the future.
Psychology
See more Psychology
The Internet Has Not Killed Reading—or Attention Spans
An interview with Kevin Ashton, MIT technology pioneer and author of The Story of Stories
Heat Probably Doesn’t Make You More Aggressive
An interview with a behavioral economist about cake, climate change, and cooperation
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Environment
See more EnvironmentOrdinary Lab Gloves May Have Skewed Microplastic Data
That doesn’t mean microplastics aren’t a problem, though
These Seals Brave Polar Bear Country to Access an Ocean Buffet
Conservation plans for climate change must consider both fear and food
Zoology
See more Zoology
The Mystery of the Legless Lizards of Taiwan
The secretive reptile has confounded researchers for decades
Philosophy
See more PhilosophyA Light in the Dark: Finding the Good in the Natural World
Is it absurd to think that science can inform our values?
How ‘Tiny Shortcuts’ Are Poisoning Science
Seemingly harmless data tweaks are undermining the integrity of the entire field. We must define the problem to prevent it
Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs
Justin Smith-Ruiu takes a philosophical and first-person look at psychedelics
How Did Evolution Come Up With So Many Squids?
It was a slow burn followed by a big bang
Read more
See all postsNow We Know What the Insects of the Jurassic Period Sounded Like
Thanks to crickets and relatives playing their “washboards”
The Giant Sloths and Armadillos of Prehistoric Texas
Snorkeling scientists uncover a treasure trove of megafauna fossils in a flooded cave
New Ape Fossil Could Shift Our Evolutionary Origins Northward
Ancestor of humans and other great apes turns up in Egypt
How Science Fiction Can Save Us
Three scientists share their bold vision for turning stories into testable experiments
Space Screws Up Sperm’s Ability to Navigate Properly
And not because they refuse to ask for directions
The Doctors Who Say Spirituality Belongs in Medicine
Many patients with neurological disorders want spiritual care, but most clinicians are reluctant to offer it
