Neil deGrasse Tyson's latest book, Starry Messenger, analyzes real-world issues like race, gender and politics using scientific methods. In a recent interview with Tyson, we asked why he thought it was important to view these issues through a scientific lens. He answered in true Tyson fashion, "Well, nobody else was."A Starry MessengerStarry Messenger wants us to take a step back and look at contradictions from a different perspective — a cosmic perspective if you will. Tyson takes a ra ...read more

Imagine living in a world with a bus-sized “three-horned face” dinosaur that has epic battles with an intimidating carnivore like the Tyrannosaurus rex (or so the legend says). From all we’ve gathered so far, it is not hard to see that Triceratops horridus, also known as Triceratops (genus), is a distinct beast. Triceratops is a quadrupedal dinosaur of the ceratopsian family – herbivores from the Cretaceous period with a bony frill and distinct beaklike bone. They used to live in western ...read more

This story was originally published in our May/June 2023 issue as "The Archaeology of Flavor." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.When it comes to ancient foods, archaeologists can easily glean main ingredients based on butchered bones and plant remains found in cooking areas. But every chef — and diner — knows dietary staples don’t make meals delectable or distinctive. It’s flavor, rendered through spices, herbs and culinary craft, that defines a dish. Certain ...read more

Pity the poor slime mold. As if that name itself wasn’t bad enough, some species have even worse monikers, like dog vomit or scrambled egg slime. And despite the fact that they come in many striking shapes and colors, even the researchers who study them have to admit that many slime molds aren’t going to win you any lawn-and-garden contests if you find them growing in your flowerbed or mulch pile.But in their own quiet way, they are much cooler — and smarter — than most people realize. H ...read more

The rings of Saturn are one of the most spectacular sights in the Solar System and one of the most photographed. Despite the interest they garner, astronomers still puzzle over how the rings formed and why they have survived. One clue is that Saturn’s rings sit within the Roche limit, the theoretical distance at which gravitational tidal forces from the parent planet would tear apart any ordinary moon. Indeed, that has turned out to be a common feature of other rings. In 1977, astronomers disc ...read more

On March 29, 2023, the crowds of the NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam vibrated with excitement as the first-ever meatball comprised of woolly mammoth meat — grown in a lab using mammoth DNA from the long-extinct species — sat on display.The mammoth meat was created from myoglobin proteins made by Vow, an Australian biotechnology company. Though not intended for human consumption, the meatball still sparked a dialogue about eating extinct cultured meat.“Cultured meat products [are] expected ...read more

The oldest verified human to walk the Earth was a French woman named Jeanne Louise Clement, who nearly spent time in three centuries over her 122 years from 1875 to 1997, according to the Guinness World Records.Most of us won’t be that lucky, but life expectancy has increased greatly in just a few decades due to modern health practices, sanitation and other factors. But what was the life expectancy of ancient humans?The answer is nearly impossible to answer in most cases due to the lack of det ...read more

This story was originally published in our May/June 2023 issue as "Far & Away." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On July 19, 2021, 10 days after leaving Cape Town, South Africa, the MFV Edinburgh finally sighted land. The ship had sailed west toward Rio de Janeiro, though it was never headed there. Its destination was Tristan da Cunha, an island smaller than the city of Boston that lies roughly halfway between Africa and South America, in the middle of the South A ...read more

This story was originally published in our May/June 2023 issue as "Making Waves." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On Feb. 11, 2016, scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) unveiled the first direct detection of gravitational waves — produced, in this case, by the merger of two black holes, 1.3 billion light-years away. The announcement (and accompanying scientific paper) came 100 years after Albert Einstein’s 1916 prediction t ...read more

Colorectal cancer among adults 50 and younger has increased in the last three decades. Although the disease is still rare among younger adults, researchers question whether the spike is related to the rising popularity of ultra-processed foods (UPFs).Scientists are paying more attention to UPFs, and their findings are becoming mainstream. One study in Cell Metabolism, for example, made headlines after researchers found that participants lost weight after two weeks of eating minimally pro ...read more