Stories

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 …

Grass on the sand dunes dawdles in a breeze. The air drifting in from the Pacific Ocean is clear and cool on this gray February morning. But Kimberly Prather is not outside inhaling its salty tang. …

If it wasn’t for the smell, no one would know there was a body there. The savannah grass reaches above the waists of passers-by sweating under the Gauteng summer sun. …

Vivek Sharma missed his daughter. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some much-needed family time. “We had a fine birthday, a beautiful day,” he recalled. Then Dr. Sharma was alerted to a blog post. There it was reported that a rival team of physicists had beaten his team to the discovery of the Higgs boson — the long-sought “God particle.” …

Gale Ridge could tell something was wrong as soon as the man walked into her office at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and slacks, but his skin didn’t look right: [highlight]It was bright pink, almost purple — and weirdly glassy. …

Humankind has officially extended its reach to the space between the stars.