There’s no doubt that Atlantic City is going under. The only question left is: Can an entire city donate its body to science?

Pam Houston’s new memoir is an ode to her beloved ranch, but also deals directly with the harrowing moments of childhood abuse that her fictional characters have been living through for years.

Climate change and the border wall are more connected than you might think.

What will it take to find the biggest missing object in our solar system?

Instead of building seawalls or raising the land to prepare for rising sea levels, California’s Imperial Beach is considering moving the town a few blocks back from the ocean.

Who would have thought scientists would ever compare wearing sunscreen to smoking cigarettes? At Outside magazine, Rowan Jacobsen explores.

Meteorite hunters Mike Farmer and Robert Ward travel to Carancas, a tiny village at 12,000 feet in Peru’s remote altiplano, to examine a crater in the hope to claim precious rock from space.

Science journalist Alice Robb on why we need to take our dreams seriously.

Steven Bedard, a former field biologist, travels around Bangladesh with a team of public health investigators studying Nipah, a bat-borne virus with the potential to become the next pandemic.

If new parents say they don’t have intrusive thoughts about harm befalling their babies, “they’re lying.”

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year in various categories. Here is the best in science and tech.

Solarpunk, a new genre of science fiction, demands radical optimism of its writers and readers. It takes the apocalypse as given, but doesn’t assume the worst of people living through it.

They tried every deterrent, including forced relocation, but Herschel the sea lion and his posse returned year after year to enjoy the free steelhead salmon buffet in Puget Sound.

Kimi Eisele contemplates coherence, the near extinction of the vaquita, and the expensive bycatch of being human.

Angora rabbit fur is fluffy, and silky, and was especially popular with two influential 20th-century groups: Hollywood starlets and Nazi officers.  

Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. Modern fire suppression creates fuels that lead to catastrophic fires. So why do people insist on rebuilding in the firebelt?

While science labors to comprehend the variety and volume of insects on earth, both are declining with disturbing speed, and the ecological consequences are troubling.

“On Vancouver Island, karst researchers hustle to save one of Earth’s most underappreciated—and fragile—ecosystems: an ecosystem hidden in plain sight.”

Amber Olsen needs to raise one million additional dollars to fund life-saving research for her daughter, Willow.

On pregnancy, demons, and Stranger Things.

Oh, your first wife died in a freak accident too?

Is it the black mold causing your headaches, or is it all in your head? Don’t turn to science. It has no answers.

It’s a field as small as the people it operates on, and for many parents, it’s the only hope their children have.

Physiognomy is a discarded 19th-century pseudoscience. Why can’t we stop practicing it?

Oh, did you think we didn’t realize that we’re fat? We’re all set, thanks, because the world never lets us forget it.

New books about the opioid crisis — “Dopesick,” “Fight for Space” and “American Fix” — have different ideas about who’s to blame and what to do next. Our critic says regulating supply can have deadly consequences, and we need to address users’ pain.

Cisco, Utah can’t be a ghost town, because Eileen Muza lives there, but people sure treat it that way.

Elon Musk can’t wait to send humans to the Moon and Mars. But before we land ourselves on other worlds, we need to remember how we’ve treated our own.

In the mountains of southwestern New Mexico, a seasoned fire lookout watches as his beloved forest and his personal life burn, and he tries to imagine what will arise from their ashes.

Sometimes it takes a touch of darkness to create something alluring.