Stories

Seeking to impress both gods and humans, early state societies across the globe displayed their power by ritually killing human victims

A new study shows that trees in the Boston region grow faster and store more carbon as biomass the closer they are to developed areas.

Walking by the side of her house, Rimiko Yoshinaga points at the broad, vine-encrusted tree her grandfather used to climb. During one of the most famous environmental disasters in history, this tree stood over the calm, clear waters of the Shiranui Sea. He would perch up there and call down to say whether the fish were coming, Rimiko says. …

Douglas Fox’s story, on new technology that allows scientists to see the forces behind the flames, won the AAAS Kavli award in 2017. Fox is a freelance journalist who writes extensively on earth, Antarctic, and polar sciences. Aircraft N2UW has flown […]

Living on the edge has always been risky. Now our blurry edges are beginning to vanish.

The light in the room softly brightened and grew warmer, yellower, somehow more embracing. …

Just over a billion years ago, many millions of galaxies from here, a pair of black holes collided. They had been circling each other for aeons in a sort of mating dance, gathering pace with each orbit, hurtling closer and closer. …

NIR BARZILAI IS 57 YEARS OLD. There are wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and his hair is turning grey. As the director of the Institute for Aging Research at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, Barzilai is more interested than most of us in the process of getting older. He studies ‘super-agers’, people between the ages of 95 and 112 who have never experienced any of the four most common diseases of aging: heart disease, diabetes, cancer and cognitive decline. …

Lizzie Wade’s story about the competing scientific theories on the geological history of the Amazon won an award given by the American Geophysical Union in 2016. Wade is a Latin America correspondent, based in Mexico City, for Science. Trudging along the bank of […]

Kenny Michelena is, by just about any measure, a tough guy. He was born and raised on a ranch in rural northwestern Wyoming and remembers that after class in elementary school, the bus driver would drop him off wherever he saw the family tractor, so he could go straight to work in the fields …