issue_44

The surprising mathematics of the extremely rare.

It pays to imagine your life is on a winning streak.

When I tell Katie Sieving, an avian wildlife ecologist at the University of Florida, that it’s probably a stretch to call “mobbing” an act of heroism, she laughs. Mobbing, as the term suggests, involves a mob: It’s when a group of animals band together to harass and drive out a common predator—a behavior already well-known […]

In his 2016 book, You Belong to the Universe, Jonathon Keats sets out to release Buckminister Fuller from “the zany sci-fi designs that made him notorious, and rescue him from the groupies who have impounded him as a cultish prophet.” Keats, a writer and artist who whips up his own world-changing ideas through trickster gallery […]

Bad ideas die hard, and then sometimes they come back to life. One such bad idea is the so-called design argument that goes something like this: “Behold the human eye: It is perfectly adapted to seeing the things we need to see, like predators or potential mates. It looks almost like the eye was designed […]

There’s more than one way to build a universe suitable for life.

The computational geneticist explains why she chose research over being a doctor.

The surprising message of the statistics of wealth distribution.

No one likes to hear about the freezers full of euthanized animals. It’s an uncomfortable reality, but often animal rescue workers have no option but to kill sick or badly wounded animals—as humanely as possible. For these professionals and volunteers, administering euthanasia is a major contributor to compassion fatigue—the chronic stress that stems from extended […]

The conservation ecologist discusses the plight of animals in a human-dominated landscape.