Fifty years ago, we sent the first astronauts to walk on the moon’s face. But what they brought back is just as important as what got them there. I’m talking about moon rocks, guys. And I got to go visit NASA’s lunar sample vault to...

In 2018, an orca called Tahlequah gave birth. But her daughter died within an hour. Tahlequah, however, didn't leave her body. Over the next 17 days and 1,600 kilometers, she kept it afloat atop her own. By altering her feeding and...

What if we could hear nature's ultrasonic communication -- and talk back? From a bat's shrill speech to a peacock's infrasound mating call, conservation technology researcher Karen Bakker takes us through a sound bath of animal noises...

You probably have a bag of frozen corn in your freezer, or have chowed down on a buttery ear of corn at a cookout. But not only did it take thousands of years for humans to domesticate teosinte to corral it into what we now know as corn,...

Teeth are so well preserved in the fossil record that they make the best, most informative fossils we can find, from phylogenetic studies to learning about the evolution of the human brain.

It may be possible to create a needle so small it can inject a vaccine into a single cell. But it's not the product of a medical device company. It's part of something we often think of as making us sick.

You might think of x-rays as the go-to particle to see through solid objects. But there's a subatomic particle out there that can see through everything from volcanos to lead shielding in nuclear reactors. It's called a muon, and...

In the hunt for life beyond Earth, scientists shouldn't skip over frozen planets. In some cases, ice might actually help life evolve!

Ever since we started launching stuff into space, we've communicated with spacecraft (and astronauts) using radio waves. But over the past few decades, scientists have experimented with a new technique that could make things a lot more...

Nature can be pretty noisy, but there's some stuff that's just quiet all the time - right? Well, thanks to advances in audio equipment, researchers are finding out that everything from plants to bacteria have a lot more to say that we...

Humans may use fiber optic technology to make everything from novelty desk toys to high speed internet cables, but Nature has its own ideas. For decades, scientists have debated to what extent polar bears may use the optical properties...

Of all the food options in the world, you'd think that feces would be low on anyone's preference list. But for these animals, eating poop can be anything from a delicacy to a health food - and yes, humans are on the list too.

Sponges might not look like particularly complex animals, but they've had billions of years to evolve their own special systems. And one of those systems might involve sending messages through their body in the form of light.

What do a platypus, a pufferfish, and a seahorse have in common? Why, they all managed to evolve themselves out of having a working stomach! The reasons why might vary, as well as how they manage to live their lives without them, but...

Where would biology be without microscopes? But for a long time, in order to see the smallest bits of life, that life had to be dead. Then along came Atomic Force Microscopy, which let us observe things like DNA and proteins moving...

Saturn's rings are younger than Saturn, and the most spectacular sight in the Solar System is also disappearing. How do we know? By running our finger through some cosmic dust.

Plagues of locusts have been documented since ancient times, and they affect the food supply of one in ten people today. How can we stop them? Well, computer models of locusts swarms tell us every locust is scared to death of its neighbors.

With an effective surface temperature of roughly 5,500 degrees Celsius, you might think water couldn't survive on the Sun. Well, scientists debated whether or not it was there for nearly a century, and it turns out, it can!

Atomic clocks are the best timekeepers humanity's got these days, but scientists are working toward something even better: a SUB-atomic (aka nuclear) clock.

The tree of life you learned in school is wrong, even if you just graduated. We like to sort eukaryotes into big kingdoms or supergroups, but scientists can't agree what those groups should be. Here's why that's a good thing.

Most of the world’s fungi aren’t just rarely seen or found solely underground. They’re flat out invisible - and that’s becoming a big problem.



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