As of 2023, it is estimated that some 6.92 billion smartphones, and a further 7.33 million mobile phones, are in use worldwide. Via these pocket-size devices users can, at the touch of a button, converse with others scattered all over the world. With

In a Mexican scrubland desert, a small bat flies by night, journeying hundreds of miles, pausing briefly to feast on the pollen of a singular flower: the wild agave plant. Agave plants bloom only once in their lifetime—taking 10 or even 20 years to d

More than a decade before humans launched themselves into outer space, a tiny species made the journey first. NASA first sent fruit flies on a mission in 1947 to see whether the intrepid insects would return to Earth in one piece, and enable us to co

Julius No came up tough. Abandoned by his parents, he fell in with criminals—and eventually it caught up with him. One night, an assassin aimed carefully at his chest, just left of center, and shot him through the heart. Or so he thought. But Julius

Biodiversity on Earth is a marvel.  The variety of life forms adapted to this rocky ocean planet can be difficult to conceive. Over millions of years, our flora and fauna have developed a wide variety of stunning and puzzling ways to survive and repr

When chemist Robert Hamers cracked open the crucible he had used to heat a brew of metal crystals, he was greeted with a surprise: an enchanted forest in deep shades of green. The cobalt-containing crystals he had been growing for two weeks in an ove

If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them.

This article originally appeared in  Knowable Magazine. Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper. They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their na

The defensive posture and uncanny eye contact of the turkey vulture pictured here makes it seem as though we’re interrupting an intimate moment, but photographer Nathaniel Peck wasn’t even present when this particular image was snapped. Peck’s photo

If we could talk with whales, should we? When scientists in Alaska recently used pre-recorded whale sounds to engage in a 20-minute back-and-forth with a local humpback whale, some hailed it as the first “conversation” with the cetaceans.  But the in

As the first blue hues crept into the otherwise lightless black sky, I carefully continued down the slippery ladder. Donning full scuba gear and tank—with a clipboard, fins, and underwater camera somehow all wedged, clipped, or balanced around my bod

1 The Ocean Represents 99 Percent of the Biosphere Over the last decade, I’ve been trying to write novels that resituate human beings inside the interconnected webs of a living planet. After exploring dense forest networks in The Overstory and confro

The end of the story is written, literally, in stone. Before a rock from space smashed into Earth and wiped out much of life some 66 million years ago, the rock had a long story of its own—one scientists have known surprisingly little about. Where ex

Inside a small, well-lit room in Apollo Beach, Florida, a team of scientists in white lab coats and purple gloves dip coral larvae in and out of liquid nitrogen, which spills out of blue containers as if from miniature fog machines.  The group’s miss

In 2019, rather out of the blue, a group of Australian astronomers discovered some mysterious rings in the night sky. Detected by radio telescope, these eerie, vaporous whorls looked vaguely like the viscous plasma Ghostbusters shoot from their proto