This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern Washington state to census bumblebees. We camped there over the weekend as we took part in the…

Without a doubt, the biggest questions about dreaming are all variants on this question: Why do we dream? We began studying dreaming in the early 1990s and, between the two of us,…

When a Weddell seal, native to Antarctica, plummets 400 meters beneath the ice on one of its hour-long dives, an ensemble of adaptations come together to keep it alive. The seal’s…

All drugs and treatments have side effects, but vaccines in general have the fewest.Illustration by eamesBot / ShutterstockIn the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist…

The air was warm as the skies grew dark over Diego Garcia. As the nearly full moon reached its highest point, a green sea turtle scuttled her way onto the sand. The ocean giant was…

Imagine that someone asked you to come up with a sequence of five words. In any other year, some idiosyncratic combination would likely come to mind. This year, though, one five-word…

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.New research finds that the subjective experience of time is linked to learning, thwarted expectations, and neural…

The election of Joe Biden is good news for conservation. It won’t be easy to undo the damage done to environmental laws by the Trump administration, but at least the rectification…

Hiking the Franconia Ridge Loop is an intimidating proposition. The trail, in the heart of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest, is close to 9 miles long, and peaks at…

Joe Pettit is a person of contradictions. A lover of solitude who manages teams, an engineer who writes poetry and paints, a family man who spends several months a year on remote Antarctic…