The word arrives late in the book. Richard Dawkins, the esteemed evolutionary biologist, spends most of The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press…
Elephants make deep rumbles that sit mostly below the range of human hearing. Those same low-frequency calls do something less obvious: they push vibrations into the ground, and other elephants appear to pick those vibrations up through their feet and trunks.
Two researchers propose that the constant pull we never notice is quietly holding perception and the sense of self in place. The idea is elegant, testable in principle, and so far entirely unproven.
The last time a Tyrannosaurus rex broke the auction record, it vanished for two years.
An astronaut does not return to Earth as someone who has forgotten gravity. The problem is quieter than that.
For a long time, the most visible changes to astronauts in orbit were the obvious ones.
The claim is easy to over-romanticise. The English coast has its postcard version: cliffs, beaches, wind, water, a horizon wide enough to make ordinary worries feel smaller.
Leafcutter ants routinely haul loads 50 times their body weight — a scaling trick rooted in Galileo's square-cube law and a neck joint that can bear 5,000 times an ant's weight before failing.
In 2001, ahead of the opening of the National Space Centre in Leicester, a teenager on work experience was helping to prepare the exhibits.
When an expert birdwatcher encounters a species they have never identified before, what they are doing with their brain is not simply trying harder than a beginner would.
In June 1980, the Japanese sanitary-equipment manufacturer TOTO Ltd launched the Washlet — a new consumer electronic device that bolted onto the top of a…
On the morning of Sunday, 26 December 2004 — about two hours after a 9.1-magnitude megathrust earthquake had ruptured the Indian Ocean seafloor 250 kilometres…
The drifting spots you see when you stand up too fast are not imaginary. A brief drop in blood pressure starves the retina for a heartbeat or two, and the photoreceptors, running on some of the most expensive metabolism in the body, fire phantom signals as their power fails.
On Saturday, 8 August 1914 — five days after the British declaration of war against the German Empire that would produce the subsequent four-year catastrophe…
In late 2012, the American film director Christopher Nolan formally took over a Warner Brothers science-fiction project that had been drifting through…
On the evening of Saturday, 6 January 1912, in the meeting hall of the Frankfurt Geological Association, a 31-year-old German meteorologist named Alfred…
