Right Now
Is Ultraprocessed Food Really That Bad?
A Harvard professor challenges conventional wisdom.
The Half-life of Robin and Kim
By now firemen, policemen, and mailmen sound like cultural relics from the 1950s next to the no-nonsense firefighters, police officers, and...
Distant Planets
In the last five years, the idea of finding planets orbiting other stars has gone from a science-fiction fantasy to a reality frequently...
Rigorous studies show that the placebo effect accounts for most of the benefits
Harvard researchers discuss the side effects of Prozac and other SSRIs
Fighting the Free Radicals
Rust never sleeps. Neither do its chemical cousins, the so-called "reactive oxygen species" whose oxidizing properties in the human body can...
Fourth-Century Church Tales
Mount Athos, jutting up from the Aegean Sea in northeastern Greece, is a place of austere traditions. Twenty Greek Orthodox monasteries cling...
High Fashion, Sub-Saharan
The ironies abound: women who can scarcely put food on the table cut elegant figures on city streets. Families who live in rundown concrete...
Wild Minds
In the summer of 1980, while doing primate research at a tourist spot in Florida, Marc D. Hauser had an unusual encounter. A female spider...
Longshots Can Win in the Schoolyard
When he was four, Raymond's family moved from Mexico to the United States. Everyone worked. The four children helped their mother deliver...
The Boy’s Dilemma
The idea that boys like to play with guns while girls prefer dolls is venerable. But in recent years, boys have started playing with real guns...
Seeds of Greatness
Of all the seed-bearing plants on earth, the angiosperms, or flowering plants, have been the most successful. There are 250,000 of them, as...