Colorful bodies painted in vibrant reds or blacks, heads dressed in wigs of human hair, and masks with eyes and mouths wide open, as if still breathing – these were the mummies made by the Chinchorro people.They were among the earliest ancient humans to settle on what’s now the coast of northern Chile and southern Peru. And the mummies are the oldest in the world, predating even the first mummified pharaohs of Ancient Egypt by a couple millennia. But after thousands of years, Chinchorro mumm ...read more

This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Answers in the Ashes" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Tom Kluge was at home getting ready for work when he got the call from an emergency command center dispatch. It was Nov. 8, 2018, and a wildland fire had been spotted northeast of Pulga, a remote community tucked away in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains about 35 miles from where Kluge was stationed.At the time a fire captain specialist and 16-y ...read more

This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Floating in the Clouds" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Stepping onto one of the Uros islands in southern Peru can feel like walking on a bouncy castle. Your feet sink a bit into the mushy floor, which trembles slightly when a motorboat speeds past. That’s because this land is actually floating — on the largest lake in South America, located 12,500 feet above sea level in the Andes Mountains.Hundr ...read more

This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue as "Moth to a Flame." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Robert Hoare first spotted the elusive Izatha psychra, an endangered moth in New Zealand, on a warm night in 2005. At the center of the country’s South Island, amid the fenced flats and sloping hills of the Pukaki Scientific Reserve, the entomologist erected a generator-powered light trap. Then, an hour before midnight — just as the generator’s f ...read more

Over the past few years, we've seen multiple volcanic eruptions on the Reykjanes Peninsula in Iceland at Fagradalsfjall. These eruptions have been a tourist boon, with lava fountains and lava flows pouring out over a mostly barren landscape not far from the nation's capital city. A third eruption might be starting soon, but the playing field is suddenly much different. The focus of earthquakes, cracks in the landscape and inflation is underneath the town of Grindavík, a fishing village with a p ...read more

This story was originally published in our Nov/Dec 2023 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.Astronomical websites and press releases brim with pictures of swirling gas giants, watery terrestrial worlds, and strange planetary systems with exotic suns. But just how realistic are these artist’s concepts? Do they truly show newly discovered worlds, or are they simply fanciful pictures meant to draw you into reading about the latest addition to the exoplanetary mena ...read more

Water pollution is a growing concern globally, with research estimating that chemical industries discharge 300-400 megatonnes (600-800 billion pounds) of industrial waste into bodies of water each year.As a team of materials scientists, we’re working on an engineered “living material” that may be able to transform chemical dye pollutants from the textile industry into harmless substances.Water pollution is both an environmental and humanitarian issue that can affect ecosystems and ...read more

Timing is everything. For early risers and late-nighters alike, listening to your internal clock may be the key to success. From the classroom to the courtroom and beyond, people perform best on challenging tasks at a time of day that aligns with their circadian rhythm.Circadian rhythms are powerful internal timekeepers that drive a person’s physiological and intellectual functioning throughout the day. Peaks in these circadian rhythms vary across individuals. Some people, known as larks or ...read more

The days of having a dictionary on your bookshelf are numbered. But that’s OK, because everyone already walks around with a dictionary – not the one on your phone, but the one in your head.Just like a physical dictionary, your mental dictionary contains information about words. This includes the letters, sounds and meaning, or semantics, of words, as well as information about parts of speech and how you can fit words together to form grammatical sentences. Your mental dictionary is also li ...read more

The Caspian tiger's (Panthera tigris virgata) story is a tragic tale. Once a dominant predator of Asia's diverse landscapes, its disappearance testifies to the darker sides of agricultural development. And though its demographic traits distinguished it as a unique subspecies within the tiger family, those traits didn’t last long, and the cat was lost to extinction in the late 20th century. So, why don't we see any of these tigers in the world today?What Was the Caspian Tiger?With a wide habita ...read more