Blog
Life Without Sunlight: The 1977 Dive That Changed Biology
Until 1977, biology textbooks had a simple rule for life on Earth. Almost every food chain started with sunlight. Plants and algae…
Blog
All Blog publications
Blog
Blog
Leafcutter Ants Were Farming Millions of Years Before Humans
Walk through a forest in Central or South America and you may see a moving green line on the ground: thousands of…
Blog
Poison Dart Frogs Don’t Make Their Own Poison. Here’s Where It Actually Comes From
Some poison dart frogs carry enough toxin in their skin to kill several adult humans, all packed into an animal small enough…
Blog
How Whales Went From Walking on Land to Ruling the Ocean
A blue whale never sets foot on land, never breathes anything but ocean air through a hole in the top of its…
Blog
What Crows Actually Understand: Tool Use, Memory, and Grudges
In 2005, a New Caledonian crow named Betty was handed a straight piece of wire and a small bucket of food sitting…
Blog
Tardigrades: The Animal That Can Survive Being Dried, Frozen, and Blasted With Radiation
Most animals die if you take away their water for more than a few days. Tardigrades, eight-legged creatures smaller than a grain…
Blog
Why So Much of the Ocean Makes Its Own Light
Drop below the reach of sunlight in the ocean, somewhere past 200 meters, and you’d expect total darkness. Instead, you’d find a…
Blog
How Anything Survives at the Bottom of the Mariana Trench
Almost 11 kilometers down, in the deepest known point on Earth, sits a place called the Challenger Deep. The pressure there is…