Leifur James

Bees evolved from wasp ancestors around 100 million years ago. Their shift to a vegetarian diet had a profound effect on the evolution of flowering plants. By Tim Flannery.

Deepsea Oddities

When your mouth is tiny, teamwork can help to take down enormous prey. By Christie Wilcox.

Chad Cowan

There are still people out there who don't believe in evolution, and frankly, we don't want to start that argument. Instead, we'd prefer to just point to those moments when natural selection made itself suddenly, dramatically known.

Reductionism breaks the world into elementary building blocks. Emergence finds the simple laws that arise out of complexity. These two complementary ways of viewing the universe come together in modern theories of quantum gravity. By Robbert Dijkgraaf.

By draining the fluids from several hosts, dodder vines inadvertently allow plants to communicate with each other and share alarm signals. By Ed Yong.

Take chemistry, add energy, get life. The first tests of Jeremy England’s provocative origin-of-life hypothesis are in, and they appear to show how order can arise from nothing. By Natalie Wolchover.

Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure. By Franco Vazza, Alberto Feletti.

The evolutionary biologist Jessica Flack seeks the computational rules that groups of organisms use to solve problems. By Joshua Sokol.

Spiders appear to offload information processing tasks to their webs, leading some to suggest that a mind can be located outside of the head. By Joshua Sokol.

Sooner or later any theory of consciousness must address this question: How can it be that during sleep, but very occasionally in waking moments too, we have experiences that have nothing to do with the world immediately around our bodies? By Riccardo Manzotti and Tim Parks.

For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach and Back, his eighteenth book, Dennett presents a valuable and typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. By Thomas Nagel.

Life was long thought to obey its own set of rules. But as simple systems show signs of lifelike behavior, scientists are arguing about whether this apparent complexity is all a consequence of thermodynamics. By Philip Ball.

Oceanographers dropped mini underwater drones off the coast of California and found they congregated like plankton. By Vishnu Varma.

Footprints of the gods, not so much, but the grassland phenomenon is still pretty cool. By Michael Byrne.

A short trip to an ancient village was the catalyst for a profound shift in Picasso’s work – but it is often overlooked. Alastair Sooke finds out more.

Max Cooper. Video by Maxime Causeret

AI Could Be Conscious and Unpredictable. By Cody Delistraty,