Maria Temming

These mysterious whitish-gray glows in the northern lights might be cousins of the mauve light streak known as STEVE.

A deep-sea detector glimpsed a particle with 220 million billion electron volts of energy — around 20 times as energetic as any neutrino seen before.

A chemical in Adélie penguin guano may have cued krill to take evasive maneuvers in lab tests.

Ammolite gems’ fabulous colors arise from delicate assemblies of crystal plates.

Simple chemistry could give the reindeer his famously bright snout. But physics would make it look different colors from the ground.

Takanori Takebe’s strange investigation into whether humans can use the gut for breathing has surprisingly sentimental origins: helping his dad.

Cosmology and quantum physics both offer tantalizing possibilities that we inhabit just one reality among many. But testing that idea is challenging.

Linguists can mix, match or even break the rules of real-world languages to create interesting imaginary ones.

From the hush of people coming to a standstill to the reverberations of fans, seismic data can capture the ebbs and flows of human activity.

A mathematical model shows that attempting to sever a fundamental particle of light could conjure new ones out of thin air.