biology
Heterocephalus glaber breaks almost every rule mammalian biology is supposed to follow. It lives 30 years on a 10-year body plan, almost never gets cancer, feels no pain from acid or capsaicin, tolerates oxygen levels that would kill most mammals, and runs a eusocial colony like an insect....
history
The story of the lightbulb is told as Edison's triumph in his Menlo Park laboratory, but the real history is a 200-year arc through dozens of inventors, three lighting transitions, and one of the most consequential energy displacements in human history.
biology
Octopuses, squid, and cuttlefish edit roughly 60% of their RNA transcripts in their nervous systems, compared to less than 1% in humans. The mechanism is now reasonably well understood, and what it implies about how these animals think is unsettling.
science
Plants do not have nervous systems and yet they sense, integrate, and respond to a wide range of environmental signals with surprising sophistication. The mechanisms — calcium signaling, electrical waves, chemical messengers, and slow growth-based responses — solve problems that animals so...
biology
A creosote bush in the Mojave Desert may go six months without rain. Some have lived for thousands of years. The strategies that desert plants have evolved are not a single trick but a portfolio of solutions to the same fundamental problem, and the diversity of those solutions is one of th
history
Paper is so ubiquitous that it is almost invisible. The story of how it came to be ubiquitous spans 1900 years, three continents, several state secrets, a millennium of industrial concentration in a small number of European cities, and the chemistry breakthroughs that made it cheap enough
history
For most of human history, mirrors were small, expensive, distorted, and treated as marvels. The clear silvered-glass mirror that any household can afford is a 19th-century invention. The path to it runs through obsidian, polished metal, the secret recipes of Murano, and a young German che
biology
Cut off a salamander's leg and it grows a new one. Cut off another and it grows a third. The animal will replace eyes, jaws, sections of heart, and parts of brain with anatomical accuracy. No mammal does this. The mechanism is not a single molecule but a developmental program that adult sa
history
For most of human history, a foot was the foot of whoever was selling the cloth, and a bushel was whatever fit in the merchant's basket. The transition to standardized units is one of the slowest and most contested infrastructure projects in the history of civilization, with stakes that in
biology
A loggerhead hatchling that scrambles down a Florida beach in August will spend the next seven to twelve years circling the entire North Atlantic — past the Azores, around the gyre, and back to within a few kilometers of where she was born. She does this without parental instruction, witho
history
For ten thousand years humans wore animals and plants. Then in a single decade between 1935 and 1945, organic chemistry produced nylon, polyester, acrylic, and spandex. The transformation in textile material was the largest in human history and almost no one remembers when it happened.
biology
In a few species of Southeast Asian and American firefly, thousands of insects flash in perfect unison, their rhythms aligned to within milliseconds. The mechanism, worked out over half a century of research, is one of the cleanest examples of decentralized coordination in biology.