Archivo: The Atlantic
Why There Are No Nuclear Airplanes
Strategists considered sacrificing older pilots to patrol the skies in flying reactors.
Plants Can Hear Animals Using Their Flowers
And they react to the buzzing of pollinators by sweetening their nectar.
Animals Keep Creating Mysteries by Sounding Weird
The Cuban cricket crisis is the latest in a long history of human-animal misunderstandings.
Scientists Have Been Studying Cancers in a Very Strange Way for Decades
By growing cells in unrealistic liquids, they may have inadvertently skewed the results of their experiments.
Who Gets to Look Out to the Edge of the Universe?
For years, more men than women were allowed to use the world’s most powerful telescope—until the system changed.
What Chewed-Up Gum Reveals About Life in the Stone Age
Chewed tar is an unexpectedly great source of ancient DNA.
When a Killer Climate Catastrophe Struck the World’s Oceans
The worst extinction in Earth’s history offers chilling predictions for the planet’s future—and for humanity’s efforts to keep climate doom at bay.
Project Troy: How Scientists Helped Refine Cold War Psychological Warfare
By working for the CIA, a crack team of researchers honed the United States’ first formal peacetime campaign of propaganda and manipulation.
The Dawn of Interplanetary Geology
NASA’s newest Mars mission is poised to transform the most terrestrial of sciences.
Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses
Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.