I was born on the summer solstice in an age without a name.My parents were born in a previous geological epoch. Six unknowing months before the start of the Great Depression, my father…

This summer, NASA’s Perseverance rover will set out on a voyage to the edge of the Jezero crater on Mars. The goal of the mission is to learn more about our neighboring planet, and…

As a writer on physics, I’m always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and while working on my last book, Spooky Action at a Distance,…

Robert Macfarlane grew up obsessed with climbing mountains and nearly died on several occasions as he scaled some of the world’s high peaks. He found a safer way to indulge his alpine…

Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock…

In late winter of 1975, a seismologist named Cao Xianqing tracked a series of small earthquakes near Haicheng, China, which he took to presage a much larger one to come. On the morning…

It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d sailed from, hovering over a hydrothermal vent field…

“If the Lord won’t send us water, oh, we’ll get it from the devil.”—Banjo Paterson, “Song of the Artesian Water” (1896) It’s April in the outback of New South Wales,…

One day last May, a muddy truck bound down a dirt road through the backwoods of Gainesville, Florida. It pulled up in a cloud of dust to a sprawling green farmhouse with a wide front…

In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar…