Nature

High above an ancient battlefield, a small shadow streaks across the sky. If you could follow its flight, you would see a pigeon, fierce and determined, a tiny cylinder strapped to its leg. Inside that cylinder, a message: perhaps a general’s desperate plea for reinforcements or a lover’s words from a besieged city. For thousands…

On a cold dawn in the early 1900s, a lone coyote watched from a distant ridge as men on horseback scattered poison across the frostbitten grass. For decades, scenes like this played out across the American West. Ranchers and government agents waged an all-out war on predators, determined to cleanse the wild landscape of any…

What if the honey on your morning toast came not from flowers, but from rotting flesh? It sounds like a horror-movie premise, yet in the rainforests of Central and South America, there are bees that do exactly this. These so-called “vulture bees” forego flowers and feast on carrion, turning putrefying meat into an edible substance…

How the vastness of space can rob us of meaning