Awards: AAAS Kavli Award

Danielle McNicoll wheeled her fiancé into his hospital room after physical therapy, then turned his power chair to face a mirror and ran her fingers through his hair. He never would have let it get this long, she thought. …

In the den, the walls were white like ice. Light came from a single red bulb. The air smelled of cool concrete, of straw piled thick, and of a heavy, captive musk. Somewhere, tucked under her 600-pound mother, was Nora. …

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 […]

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. …

In the northern reaches of the Tibetan Plateau, dozens of yaks graze on grasslands that look like a threadbare carpet. The pasture has been munched down to bare soil in places, and deep cracks run across the snow-dusted landscape. The animals’ owner, a herder named Dodra, emerges from his home wearing a black robe, a cowboy hat and a gentle smile tinged with worry. …

Meet Adam. He’s a mid-level engineer at a mid-level software company in a cookie-cutter California office park. …

WEST OF PAHRUMP, Nevada, in a corner of the Mojave Desert a couple thousand feet above Death Valley, a warm aquifer provides a home for one of the world’s rarest animals. …

On the outskirts of Beijing, a small limestone mountain named Dragon Bone Hill rises above the surrounding sprawl. …

Stanford University, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and other prestigious medical research institutions have flagrantly violated a federal law requiring public reporting of study results, depriving patients and doctors of complete data to gauge the safety and benefits of treatments, a STAT investigation has found. …

By the time Bob Ackley crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan he’d been up for nearly four hours. It was still dark, not yet seven on a Sunday morning: the best time of the week to go sniffing for gas. …