Shedding Light on the Cost of Light Pollution
Artificial light has a huge variety of harmful effects on ecosystems. Scientists are exploring ways to mitigate the damage.
Could Negentropy Help Your Life Run Smoother?
In physics, entropy is the process of a system losing energy and dissolving into chaos. This applies to social systems in everyday life, too.
What Happens to a Tree When It Dies?
Decomposing trees on the forest floor become "dead wood"—a part of ecosystems that researchers are only beginning to understand.
Where Drug Trafficking and Climate Change Collide
With mounting pressure from cartels and worsening environmental conditions, Mexico’s Indigenous Rarámuri communities face a fraught future.
The Mathematical Pranksters behind Nicolas Bourbaki
Bourbaki was gnomic and mythical, impossible to pin down; his mathematics just the opposite: unified, unambiguous, free of human idiosyncrasy.
How the Gender Binary Limits Archaeological Study
One case study demonstrates how contemporary assumptions about gender in ancient societies risk obscuring the larger picture.
How Three Women Led the Fight against Pertussis
As whooping cough killed thousands of kids annually, a trio of public health workers were deeply involved in the production and distribution of a vaccine.
Could Venus’s Hell Climate Predict Earth’s Future?
The answer will require a probe that can withstand the planet's heat and atmospheric pressure to send back good data.
Plant of the Month: Fuchsia
Too popular for its own good? The career of a flower so powerfully beautiful, fashion would inevitably declare it over.