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The underwater mountains of the Nazca and Salas y Gómez ridges are a world unto themselves. Running for 1,800 miles off the coast of Peru, they are isolated by a vast low-oxygen zone, the depths of the Atacama Trench, and the powerful Humboldt Current—an isolation that allowed evolution to follow its own trajectory....

This fall, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s once- (and possibly future-) CEO made a surprising statement about artificial intelligence. AI systems, including that company’s ChatGPT, are known to “hallucinate”: perceive patterns and generate outputs that are nonsensical. That wasn’t a flaw in AI systems, Altman said, it was part...

Aesthetic bewilderment” is a kind of common ground in science and art, an engine for new ideas in both disciplines, writes Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in the introduction to a new book of photographs and essays about bacteria by microbiologist Tal Danino. That book, titled Beautiful Bacteria: Encounters in the Microu...

As a writer on physics, I’m always seeking new metaphors for understanding Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and while working on my last book, Spooky Action at a Distance, I thought I’d compare the warping of space and time to the motion of Earth’s tectonic plates. Einstein explained gravity as the bending o...

The ecological success of bats, their almost worldwide distribution, and their phylogenetic diversity is in large part thanks to flight. Bats are the only mammals able to truly fly, and the name of their scientific order, Chiroptera, translates to hand wing. The oldest nearly complete skeleton of a bat dates from 52...

How tiny one-celled protists pull off their strange and marvelous feats. By Kristen French March 14, 2024 In any given drop of pond water, you may find a surprising spectacle: some of the tiniest creatures on Earth contorting and twisting at lightning speed, like miniature break dancers. These ciliated protists—sing...

On the last day of fishing season, Ayami Nakata starts her morning by lighting a small fire in her hut beside the harbor. The temperature outside hovers around freezing, and as Nakata warms, she changes into a wetsuit; gathers her facemask, chisel, and floating net bag; and walks to the docks with her husband, where...

Please excuse me for being excited, but this hasn’t happened for more than four decades: Physicists have found a new approach to solving a problem which is almost a century old—how to combine quantum physics with gravity. The new idea comes from Johnathan Oppenheim, a professor of quantum theory at University Colleg...

Earlier this year, Bjorn Bergman noticed something odd about a fishing ship off the coast of Mauritania.Like other large ships in those heavily fished waters, this trawler broadcasted Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio signals. AIS information contains a ship’s name, location, speed, and course—invaluable d...

Back in the early 1990s, Dave Tholen, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii, had an intellectual itch he couldn’t quite scratch. His specialty was finding and mapping asteroids—he had even served on an early “detection committee” that NASA had helped organize. The committee had recommended that Tholen search for...

Two photographers in Maui, out on a boat, spotted a pair of humpback whales in January 2022. They cut the engine and drifted, as the whales approached their boat and began to circle, just 15 feet or so below the surface. Dipping their cameras a foot into the water, they started snapping pictures.Over the next half h...

For eight years, astronomers have hunted for a mysterious “Planet Nine” on the edges of our solar system. Although no one’s ever seen it, they’ve deduced its presence from observations of unusual clustering among asteroids found in the Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region of icy objects that is home to Pluto and most ...

There are three fundamental rules of humor. Unfortunately, no one can remember what they are. We can probably blame the Greek philosopher Aristotle for this because he apparently wrote an entire book on laughter, which was then lost. His mistake was not to write on tablets of stone. They are harder to lose, but the ...

A century ago, physics breakthroughs came in rapid sequence. There was quantum mechanics and Einstein’s theories of space and time, lots of new particles, two new nuclear forces, and eventually the standard model of particle physics. This progress and its technological applications commanded respect, if not outright...

In the beginning, about 4.6 billion years ago, all was chaos within a cloud of gas left over from a previous generation of stars. There was nothing but molecules of dust and gas, swirling around in the void. The star stuff drew closer together, and then something happened.The material started to collapse under its o...

The gossamer worm is a tiny feathery creature that lives 4,000 feet below the surface of the sea, in the blackest depths of the deep ocean. Recently, scientists found evidence that to locate its prey— larval fish and transparent arrow worms—the creature uses a pair of antenna-like tentacles to probe the water for wh...

Aging can seem like an unregulated process: As time marches along, our cells and bodies inevitably accumulate dings and dents that cause dysfunctions, failures, and ultimately death. However, in 1993 a discovery upended that interpretation of events. Researchers found a mutation in a single gene that doubled a worm’...

In the beginning, there is nothing. Then a stroke of white appears. And another. Characters form. Shapes emerge from the darkness. Order out of chaos.Something magical happens when a scientist writes with chalk on a blackboard. Hollywood directors know this, and have harnessed it in films from A Beautiful Mind to Op...

The debate over deep-sea mining has focused almost entirely on environmental impacts: how marvelous communities of life, little-known and unlike any others on Earth, would be affected by the industrialized extraction of seabed minerals. Not much attention is paid to the economics. It’s taken for granted that, whatev...

Sperm don’t get much respect. They’re little more than a bare-bones package of DNA outfitted with a lashing tail. And they’re produced in such vast numbers that no single pollywog counts for very much. We all know about their co-starring role in reproduction. But as a 2023 Nature paper underscores, sperm represent s...

How are we to know what is real, on the internet? When a faked photo of an explosion near the Pentagon briefly spooked Wall Street this spring, it was the first major case of a viral AI-generated image moving the market. The hoax wilted under scrutiny, but to many, it seemed like a harbinger of far worse to come.And...