The death of an iconic California glacier signals the loss of one scientist’s work, the end of an epoch, and possibly the beginning of a new era of mass extinction.

The attention economy is killing us and the planet. Artist and writer Jenny Odell talks about why slowing down could be the only way to survive.

To date, 21 disembodied feet have washed up on the shores of Seattle’s Salish Sea. What at first looked like the work of a serial killer turned out to be something even more unsettling: A message from the ocean about who we are.

Moving from bustling, expensive Seattle to tiny Ashland, Oregon seemed like an improvement, until the forest fire season began.

“I joke that this is the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.”

“I thought, ‘This is it, this is how I’m going to die, right here on the table, and my family will never know what my last few hours were like because no one’s even noticing what’s going on.’”

What happens when you ride an e-scooter out of the city limits — until its battery dies?

Donald Cline justified his deception with choice bible verses, so that makes everything okay.

According to primatologist Frans de Waal, we don’t like to admit that animals, especially apes, have emotions just like ours, and science has become better at studying apes’ behaviors than human ones.

Born from irritation and intrusion, luminous and complex, surprisingly durable: pearls are rich with symbolism and saturated with pain.

In light of recent events in crisis-ridden Venezuela, its last vertebrate paleontologist puts together key pieces of the baffling puzzle that the country has become in the past couple of decades.

The sprawling Los Angeles Metropolitan Area is the best place in America to reassess the way we write and think about the natural world.

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.”