Once you’ve seen a slime mold—its gooey, delicately branching structure oozing in a vaguely unsettling way along a log or leaf—you’re unlikely to forget it. They’re unmistakable because there’s ...

One night over drinks at a conference in San Jose, Miles Padgett, a physicist at Glasgow University in Scotland, was chatting with a colleague about whether or not they could make light go slower than ...

At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, snowboarding made its debut as an Olympic sport. No longer relegated to the fringes, snowboarders took to the snow-capped peaks of Mount Yakebitai, and 26 ...

After a U.S. Supreme Court ruling, DNA databases are set to expand. How will the decision affect your privacy? Certain information encoded in DNA, seen here in an x-ray data visualization, is being ...

Could a handful of stone tools coated with a sticky black substance conceal a vital clue to the mysterious Neanderthals? NOVA's "Decoding Neanderthals" explores a surprising claim that these ...

They haven't got no noses, The fallen sons of Eve; Even the smell of roses Is not what they supposes; But more than mind discloses And more than men believe. —from "The Song of the Quoodle," G.K.

The teeth of Shanidar 1, a male Neanderthal unearthed from Shanidar Cave in Iraqi Kurdistan. Shanidar 1 lost his right arm at the elbow, possibly due to a congenital or childhood disease or an ...

It was, perhaps, inevitable. Once we gained the ability to modify the DNA of an organism, it was only a matter of time before we turned that technology on ourselves and our offspring. Now, Chinese ...

(This program is no longer streaming). Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs in a fiery global catastrophe. But we know little about how their successors, the mammals, ...

Chris Mazurek was a freshman in college when he had a dream that he was inside the Legends of Zelda video game. He saw himself as the main protagonist, Link, in third person. Suddenly, beeping noises ...

If a theory doesn’t make a testable prediction, it isn’t science. It’s a basic axiom of the scientific method, dubbed “falsifiability” by the 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper. General ...

In a contest for the least contentious statement a person can make, “What goes up must come down” is surely a strong contender. Of the four known fundamental forces—gravity, the electromagnetic force, ...