It’s one thing to fall in love with creatures we consider regal, clever, or sweet, but what about those we’ve learned to swat away? I’ve never liked flies, especially after an encounter years earlier on the great Gariep River, which stretches from So

Einstein’s theory of gravity is a cornerstone of modern cosmology. It has been tested and proven correct over and over again and is supported by the discovery of countless cosmic phenomena: from the gravitational lensing detected by Arthur Eddington

We land-dwellers tend to take for granted the continents upon which we live out our days and nights. But Earth’s continents are in fact a planetary oddity. No other planet in our solar system—or outside of it, as far as we know—hosts large land mass

On most trails, a hiker climbing from valley floor to mountain top will be caressed by cooler and cooler breezes the farther skyward they go. But there are exceptions to this rule: Some trails play trickster when the conditions are right. Cold air sl

Climate change is transforming our measurements of many things—summer temperatures, the level of the seas, the strength of hurricanes, for instance. But now, as polar ice caps melt with more regularity, it’s even messing with how we keep time. Accord

It sounds like the setup to a joke: When I was starting out as a stand-up comedian, I was also working as a research scientist at a sperm bank.  My lab was investigating the causes of infertility in young men, and part of my job was to run the clinic

Green is the color of growth in the plant world. From an aerial view, most farms blanket the land in quilts of varying shades of green. But what if the stems and leaves of your average corn, barley, and rice plants were hairy and blue instead? One te

Yes, you can get bad coffee in Vienna. Vienna is known for its beautiful cafés, where philosophers, poets, and scientists have found inspiration over endless cups of fantastic coffee for hundreds of years. Coffee is still at the heart of Viennese cul

More than a decade ago a skinny-legged knee-less robot named Ranger completed an ultramarathon on foot. Donning a fetching red baseball cap with “Cornell” stitched on the front, and striding along at a leisurely pace, Ranger walked 40.5 miles, or 65

The world of larval plainfin midshipman fish may look alien, but it could be as close as the cobbles beneath your feet, if you walk the rocky shores found along much of the North American West Coast. Adults of this species swim each spring from the o

Sardines are never solitary. Even in death they are squeezed into a can, three or five to a tin, their flattened forms perfectly parallel. This slick congruity makes sense. In life, sardines are evolved for synchronicity: To avoid and confuse predato

They say, never meet your heroes. Daniel Dennett, who was exceptional in so many ways, and who died last month, was for me an exception to this rule, too. Like so many, I was first inspired by Dennett on reading one of his many bestsellers: Conscious

Daniel Dennett, who died in April at the age of 82, was a towering figure in the philosophy of mind. Known for his staunch physicalist stance, he argued that minds, like bodies, are the product of evolution. He believed that we are, in a sense, machi

When George Washington was a young man, he was far from the level-headed statesman depicted in paintings and books from the Revolutionary War era. Born in 1732 into a second-tier Virginia family, Washington was drawn to a military career as a way to

Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has