Mole Rats and War
This story is about a creature with a head like a furry shovel, and a body about the size of a sneaker. By rodent standards, the sandy blind mole rat ...
Borrowed vision
People who suffer from retinitis pigmentosa lose their vision as the light-sensitive cells in their eyes start to break down. But what if they could b...
Your Brain on Holidays
Caution! The holiday season is upon us. Terrible holiday jingles blast out of every speaker and get stuck in your head, there’s so much to do before t...
Russian Flu aka American Fever
In the late 19th century, a deadly illness spread across Asia and into Europe, infecting millions, and prompting what may have been the world’s first ...
To Teach and Die for Ukraine: The Story of Yulia Zdanovska
Ukraine is a country that produces a lot of talented math and programming students, and Yuliya Zdanovska was among the most promising. But it was the ...
The Neanderthals’ Last Gift
The world is quickly running out of effective antibiotics to treat fast-evolving bacteria. Even routine dental work or knee replacements could soon re...
The Friendliest and the Most Ruthless Species on the Planet
There are few noises as guaranteed to chill the blood as that of a group of chimpanzees attacking another group of chimps. Wild chimps are notoriously...
How Feminism Helps to Understand Elephants
Humans have been fascinated by elephants since forever. But until a few decades ago, we didn’t know the most basic things about them, like how they ch...
What is menstruation for?
Strangely enough, we don’t quite know. Only a few mammals regularly shed their entire uterine lining. According to one hypothesis, menstruation evol...
The Leakey Family and the Human Family
For decades, scientists believed that humans gradually evolved — more or less in a straight line — from knuckle-walking apes to upright-walking, sneak...