There are more than 8,000 species of amphibians on Earth, and not one of them lives in the sea. Fewer than 2% tolerate any salt at all, and even those have limits. It is a striking gap. Whales, sea turtles and penguins each show that mammals, reptiles and birds can live at sea, with no […]

When the James Webb Space Telescope began photographing galaxies from the universe’s earliest chapters, astronomers ran into a problem. There were more very bright galaxies than their models predicted, and some looked far too massive for such a young cosmos. Part of that puzzle has since faded. Some of those objects turned out to be […]

Beside the airport of Larnaca, on the south-east coast of Cyprus, there is a salt lake. About 3,500 years ago it was a sheltered bay, and on its shore stood a port city of up to 50 hectares (124 acres). That is roughly 90 American football fields, or a square you could walk across in […]

Between 34,000 and 25,000 years ago, much of Europe shared a way of life that archaeologists call the Gravettian. It is recognized by its stone and bone tools, by the way people buried their dead, and by small carved figurines of women known as Venus figurines. They turn up from the Atlantic side of the […]