Siddhartha Mukherjee has an arresting thought experiment: What if, along with your familiar elementary-school report card, you had a genetic report card—one that read out your propensity…

Traveling induced jet lag isn’t the only thing that causes untimely fatigue. Ignoring your biological rhythms can lead to chronic exhaustion, too, something that feels so much like…

Every time he bent over a freshly dead body, pathologist George Martin pondered the diversity before him. Although his cadavers almost always belonged to the elderly, they varied dramatically.…

Can a planet be alive? Lynn Margulis, a giant of late 20th-century biology, who had an incandescent intellect that veered toward the unorthodox, thought so. She and chemist James Lovelock…

One Tuesday in January, a leather briefcase strung across my shoulder, I tramped through the damp campus of a large California university, looking for the classroom where I would lecture.…

In winter, the knots come by the thousands to feast on the riches in the intertidal mudflats of the Wash. These medium-size wading birds are rather dull and unprepossessing in appearance,…

The first day of June 1988 was sunny, hot, and mostly calm—perfect weather for the three young researchers from the University of Windsor who were hunting for critters crawling across…

It can seem like a Catch-22 is baked into the practice of meditation. It’s meant, among other things, to foster patience—but meditation also seems to require considerable patience…

Have you ever wondered how your life might be different if you could see beyond the visible light spectrum—into ultraviolet or infrared? For one thing, you might be immune, or less…

The Kyrgyz soldier stepped quietly out of the dark green bushes and swung his Kalashnikov rifle in the direction of our car. Another emerged and did the same. Their checkpoint was…