Stephen McGreevy looked nervously at the sky. Outside his camper van in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, angry black clouds gathered on the horizon as 30-mile-per-hour winds whipped across the flat expanse. At his feet, an array of copper wire—hundreds of feet of it—writhed like snakes. As rain beat against the roof, McGreevy hastily gathered the […]

Did autumn reds and yellows evolve to repel insects?

Every evening as the sun sets, Robb Wolf begins his nightly ritual: While his two daughters play, he slowly dims the lights, just a few lumens every 20 to 30 minutes, until the house, in Reno, Nevada, is dark. The family is asleep before 8 p.m. and awake before dawn, as Wolf imagines our ancestors […]

In the world of modern physics, there is change afoot. Researchers are striving so hard to leap beyond the mostly settled science of the Standard Model that they’re daring to break from one of science’s crucial traditions. In pursuit of a definitive, unifying description of reality, some scientists are arguing that scientific theories may not […]

The mysteries of avian migration at night are being solved with computational power.

The ratio of boys to girls at conception has been misunderstood for centuries.