Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist o

In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places

On a Wednesday in February 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar—a rangy, soft-spoken steam engineer, who had turned 40 just the week before—stood before a group of leading scientists, members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society. He had a bold

In the fall of 2020, I installed a municipal clock in Anchorage, Alaska. Although my clock was digital, it soon deviated from other timekeeping devices. Within a matter of days, the clock was hours ahead of the smartphones in people’s pockets. People

Inside every rechargeable battery—in electric cars and phones and robot vacuums—lurks a cosmic mystery. The lithium that we use to power much of our lives these days is so common as to seem almost prosaic. But this element turns out to be a wild card

It’s 1969, in the middle of the Gulf of California. Above is a blazing hot sky; below, the blue sea stretches for miles in all directions, interrupted only by the presence of an oceanographic research ship. Aboard it a man walks to the railing, studi

Gutsy. Bloody-minded. Irresponsible. Devious. Cavalier. Reckless. Tough. There’s a Nobel Prize for each of those characteristics. The recipient of 2023’s Nobel for Medicine was certainly gutsy. To stay in the United States in 1988, Katalin Karikó, bo

We’ve all been there. In fact, I find myself there several times a day. A question emerges and my memory stumbles. Decades of education dematerialize into an expensive mist. I know I know this, or at least I should. I reach for my phone and type: Who

Behind most every tech billionaire is a sci-fi novel they read as a teenager. For Bill Gates it was Stranger in a Strange Land, the 1960s epic detailing the culture clashes that arise when a Martian visits Earth. Google’s Sergey Brin has said it was

The underwater mountains of the Nazca and Salas y Gómez ridges are a world unto themselves. Running for 1,800 miles off the coast of Peru, they are isolated by a vast low-oxygen zone, the depths of the Atacama Trench, and the powerful Humboldt Curren

From our small, terrestrial vantage points, we sometimes struggle to imagine the ocean’s impact on our lives. We often think of the ocean as a flat expanse of blue, with currents as orderly, if sinuous, lines. In reality, it is vaster and more chaoti

1 Archaeology has more application to recent history than I thought In the preface of my book, A History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks, I emphasize that it is a history of the world, not the history; the choice of sites for each chapter reflects

In 2020, scientists detected a gas called phosphine in the atmosphere of an Earth-size rocky planet. Knowing of no way that phosphine could be produced except through biological processes, “the scientists assert that something now alive is the only e

Aesthetic bewilderment” is a kind of common ground in science and art, an engine for new ideas in both disciplines, writes Brazilian artist Vik Muniz in the introduction to a new book of photographs and essays about bacteria by microbiologist Tal Dan

On July 6, 1901, Natalie Karsakoff took a break from her busy schedule to write a letter to her mentor, the French botanist Édouard Bornet. Hoping he would join her on the northwest coast of France, she couldn’t help but boast a bit about where she w

When he can spare the time, Jan Mees is an exorcist of scientific ghosts. A marine biologist, Mees’s full-time job is directing the Flanders Marine Institute in Ostend, Belgium, but his side project is serving as co-leader of an international group o

First come the sleeper sharks and the rattails and the hagfish, scruffily named scavengers of the sea, along with amphipods and crabs who pluck delicately at bits of flesh. Tiny worms, mollusks, and crustaceans arrive in their hordes of tens of thous