Microbes Might Paint Your Next Party Dress
The official “fashion month,” September has concluded its parade of gorgeous outfits. These contain harmful dyes, though. Can microbes make safer colors?
Why Do We Sleep?
A growing consensus among those who hold this view is that sleep is needed for maintaining a healthy nervous system, not necessarily a brain.
Unveiling Nature’s Mysteries: Mutant Sea Stars, Junk Jellyfish, and Duck Sex
Confront nature's mysteries, scientists find mutant sea stars surviving in warming waters and that sexual competition forces ducks to grow longer penises.
The Healthcare Wars of 1920s Harlem
In the 1920s, Harlem’s population was growing quickly. A wide variety of “magico-religious workers” emerged to respond to the community’s needs.
What Star Trek: Discovery Can Tell Us About Tech and Social Progress
What makes Star Trek essential for any contemporary tech user is its role in helping us understand our relationship to technology.
What Makes Fish Swim Fast
How do fish swim? Having fins and tails help, But it takes more than that to be fast and avoid danger. Diving into fish physics.
What Does It Mean to Own an Animal?
Those who view animals as property misunderstand the nature of property, a legal scholar suggests.
To Save the Threatened, Scientists Clone Cacao, Fertilize Mollusks, and Hunt Porpoises
All over the world, researchers are trying to better understand a world in constant flux and to prevent species from extinction as they battle for survival.
Starving Killer Whales Are Losing Most of Their Babies
The southern resident killer whales of the northeast Pacific are in trouble. As habitats and food dwindle, they increasingly miscarry and lose their babies.
The Ig Nobels: The Lighter Side of Scientific Research
What exactly are the Ig Nobels? And what can we learn from the Journal of Irreproducible Results and the Annals of Improbable Results?