An Australian fur seal pup.

Give These Adorable Seals More Privacy!

When viewing boats come too close, seals and their pups stampede into the water. Scientists say it exhausts the animals.
A flood in St Mark's Square in Venice

Our Sinking Cities

From Venice to Tehran to Shanghai, many cities are steadily sinking into the earth. There might not be any way to stop it.
A piece of polished amber

Facts and Fancies About Amber

It's taken scientists a long time to figure out what amber is made of, and what we can learn from it.
An ancient supernova

Can a Supernova Cause Mass Extinction?

Since the 1950s, scientists have been proposing supernovae as catalysts for mass extinctions. But can it be proven?
Composite image of Dmitri Mendeleev, a periodic table, and the Milky Way galaxy

How Far Does the Periodic Table Go?

Efforts to fill the periodic table raise questions of special relativity that “strike at the very heart of chemistry as a discipline.”
Photo by _HealthyMond . on Unsplash

Austen Fans, Modern Belief, and Environmental Politics

New books and scholarship from Oxford University Press, Princeton University Press, and the University Press of Colorado.
A healthcare rally in Detroit, MI

Did the Great Recession Make Us Sick?

Mass layoffs, high unemployment, and home foreclosures resulted in declines in mental health. There may also be long-term effects that linger.
Voyager 2 near Neptune and Triton

Voyager 2 Heads into the Unknown

Forty-one years after its launch, Voyager 2 has officially crossed out of the solar system and into interstellar space. What has it discovered along the way?
duck billed platypus

Our Best Stories of 2018

Victorian librarians, Mister Rogers, queer time, and Jane Austen's subversive linguistics, oh my!