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Why heterothermic animals control their body temperature
In 1774, British physician-scientist Charles Blagden received an unusual invitation from a fellow physician: to spend time in a small room that was hotter, he wrote, “than it was formerly thought any living creature could bear.” Many people may have been appalled by this offer, but Blagden was delighted by the opportunity for self-experimentation. He
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The latest on the search for the mass of a neutrino
Imagine you are given three gumballs of different flavors. You are told that one of them is heavier than the others, and one is lighter. But which is which? Your task is made difficult by the fact that these gumballs weigh nearly nothing. And sometimes they swap flavors. Oh, and when you try to pick
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What is wisdom, and can it be taught?
Emily Swanson was under pressure — not the end-of-the-world variety, but definitely stressful: prepping for her PhD qualifying exams. She fully expected the process to be grueling. But then, like a character from a heroic tale, she had an encounter that changed her path. Swanson took a job as a teaching assistant with Monika Ardelt,
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Writer KC Cole on the beauty in nature and of humanity
When the world seems dark and scary, when compassion and tolerance seem in short supply, when hostility and hate make our future foreboding, hope comes from the place we might least expect it: science. As the Roman philosopher Lucretius observed during similarly fraught times, back in 55 BC: “This dread and darkness of the mind
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Mining the deep ocean | Knowable Magazine
More than 13,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, a more-than-70- ton machine trundled like a tank on its caterpillar tracks for a tenth of a mile — sucking up potato-sized nodules of rock packed with copper, manganese, cobalt and nickel. It was 2022, and that pilot run of a subsea harvester by
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The glycome’s emerging role in health and disease
In the biological drama that is a cell’s life, you might think of DNA as the playwright, RNA as the director and proteins as the stars of the show. But life, and living things, are rarely so simple. It turns out that a less understood set of players — a crew of sugar structures known
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How new fishing tech can reduce bycatch of turtles and other creatures
Our oceans are full of sophisticated, perfect traps: Nets, hooks, fishing lines. Designed to capture animals destined for our dinner tables, they often catch other wildlife too. This accidental harvest is known as bycatch, and every year it causes the death of millions of marine animals, including whales, dolphins, sharks, turtles and seabirds. Nets and
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The many roles of non-coding RNAs in the cell
When scientists first cracked the genetic code, they expected a simple story: DNA makes RNA, and that RNA, known as messenger RNA, makes proteins. Proteins would do all the important work — building tissues, fighting infections, digesting food. But when the DNA of our genome was finally sequenced, researchers encountered a head-scratcher: The 20,000-plus genes
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Can we fight climate change by storing CO2 in the ocean?
Close to the eastern tip of Canada, in Nova Scotia’s picturesque Halifax harbor, a local firm has joined the fight against climate change. There, Planetary Technologies has figured out how to turn the cooling water of a power plant into a tool against global warming, by enhancing its capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the
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The troubling rise of family estrangement
Adult children vs. parents, siblings vs. siblings — calling quits on one’s kin seems increasingly common. In a 2025 YouGov poll of 4,395 US adults, nearly 4 in 10 respondents said they “no longer have a relationship with” one or more immediate family members. An episode of the Oprah Podcast on the “culture of estrangement”
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