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Is Ultraprocessed Food Really That Bad?
A Harvard professor challenges conventional wisdom.
A Painting with "Legs"
Like the poems Emily Dickinson stored in her attic, or John Steinbeck’s repeatedly rejected early manuscripts, one of America’s...
Driving Birds Away
If you were a bobolink thinking about breeding, you would avoid laying your eggs within three-quarters of a mile of either side of a busy...
Leaves That Lunch
The most famous carnivore of the plant kingdom, the Venus flytrap, lures insects to its leafy green lips with a sweet-smelling scent, then snaps...
The Nocebo Effect
If people expect to feel better from a pill or medical treatment, they just might, even if the pill is made of sugar or the treatment is a sham...
10 Downing Street's Gulag
In October 1952, the British governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, declared a state of emergency. Mau Mau rebels were attacking and...
Rocks into Gas
Geologists have long believed that the world's supply of oil and natural gas came from the decay of primordial plant and animal matter, which...
Fertility and Destiny
Current low birthrates among highly educated women pose a challenge to the U.S. economy and may compound existing social problems, says David...
Cilia in C-Major
In the human ear, it takes only a few millionths of a second from the time a sound wave vibrates the receiving "hair cells" to the...
Toddling Consumers
For generations now, critics as well as poets have debated what relationship, if any, poetry has to rational thought. The majority view is that...
Oyster Environmentalists
Once so degraded that residents avoided touching the brackish water, the 106-acre Wilson Bay in Jacksonville on the North Carolina coast now...