It was the morning of May 1, and the Italian village of Cocullo was almost unrecognizable. The typical placidity of its quiet alleys and muted central square had given way to several thousand people: religious travelers, musicians, young women in ornate costumes, tourists from the far corners of the country and beyond. A group of […]
Endel Tulving, whose insights into the structure of human memory and the way we recall the past revolutionized the field of cognitive psychology, died on Sept. 11 in Mississauga, Ontario. He was 96. His daughters, Linda Tulving and Elo Tulving-Blais, said his death, at an assisted living home, was caused by complications of a stroke. […]
In 1842, a vast, nearly intact skeleton was unearthed on a plantation in Alabama; it was soon identified as a member of Basilosaurus, a recently named genus of prehistoric sea serpent. But when some of its enormous bones were shipped to England, Richard Owen, an anatomist, noted that its molars had two roots, not one, […]
Espen Finstad was trudging through mud in the Jotunheimen mountains of eastern Norway this month when he happened upon a wooden arrow, bound with a pointed tip made of quartzite. Complete with feathers, it was so well-preserved that it looked as if it could have been lost just recently. But Mr. Finstad, a glacial archaeologist […]
By the time Matvey Nikelshparg was 13, he was obsessed with parasitoid wasps, tiny insects that lay their eggs on or inside other bugs. Under a microscope in a lab he had assembled at home, he discovered that one species had a startling superpower: It could use an organ that protrudes from its abdomen to […]
For hundreds of millions of years, pancake-shaped animals the size of a needle tip have been roving the seas with an appetite for tasty microbes and algae. They’re called placozoans, and are among the simplest of the major animal lineages. As simple as they are, a team of researchers has found compelling evidence of neuron-like […]
From Van Gogh’s sunflowers to Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” there’s no shortage of seminal artwork that was made with a striking hue known as cadmium yellow. But that riot of color that artists squeezed from their paint tubes isn’t necessarily what museum goers see today: cadmium yellow’s brilliance often diminishes over time, as the paint […]
Industrial-scale whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries nearly drove many whale species into extinction. Populations of some of the large marine mammals are just starting to recover after the kind of predation described in the novel “Moby-Dick,” while others face ongoing peril to their existence. But it turns out that whaling’s effects on where […]
John Pogonoski, an ichthyologist in Australia, wasn’t about to be fooled by any moray eels. He knew the serpentine fish like to hide among the nooks and crannies of large sponges. But as he surveyed sponges collected from a remote seabed off the coast of Western Australia, he stumbled on a complete surprise — a […]
The author Cat Bohannon was a preteen in Atlanta in the 1980s when she saw the film “2001: A Space Odyssey” for the first time. As she took in its famous opening scene, in which a bunch of apes picks up a bunch of bones and quickly begins using them to hit each other, Bohannon […]
