One of my favorite walkways in the world spans a beautiful fig in the village of Falealupo on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, formerly Western Samoa. My colleague the ethnobotanist…

In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just written a book about plants, Die Wurzeln der…

Blaise Pascal was a renowned French polymath of the 17th century, scientist, philosopher, mathematician, inventor, and later in life a theologian. Among his many contributions was…

There’s a silent epidemic slowly brewing around the globe. It hasn’t claimed as many lives as COVID-19, but if it gets out of control, it will likely prove even deadlier. It’s…

If you look at every ape protein, they have every bone we have, every muscle we have, the same type of hair, and on and on. They’re just better adapted to their tropical rainforest…

Everything became imbued with a sense of vitality and life and vividness. If I picked up a pebble from the beach, it would move. It would glisten and gleam and sparkle and be absolutely…

Talking to Jeremy DeSilva about human evolution was so fun. As was reading his recent book, First Steps: How Upright Walking Made Us Human. I learned something new and fascinating…

We’re not the man we used to be. Over the last 20 years, genomics, ancient DNA, and paleoanthropology have joined forces to completely overhaul our understanding of the origin of…

The deep sea is a part of our planet unlike any other. Accounting for over 95 percent of Earth’s living space, it is cold, dark, and under extreme pressure, yet an astounding variety…

It’s hard to argue with the famously authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, but its definition of physics as the “branch of science concerned with the nature and properties of…