Climate Change

In a world beset by climate change, marine pollution, and dwindling natural resources, a member of the mushrooming human population pauses to consider his role.

Meet some of the people featured in the July/August 2018 issue of The Scientist.

Scandinavian mother bears gain a survival advantage by weaning their babies later than normal, analysis of a 30-year dataset suggests.

The brown tree snake has wreaked havoc on the island of Guam, but one solution to the problem could lie in the serpent’s own physiology.

A study of Shuar children in Ecuador provides a window into how the human body responds to infection in the sorts of conditions that shaped our species’ evolution.

The function of early hominins’ enlarged brow ridges, and their reduction in size in Homo sapiens, have puzzled paleoanthropologists for decades.

Researchers devise more-realistic means of forecasting the effects of climate change on complex marine ecosystems.

Digesting a big meal takes energy, forcing some minnows to swim in spots at the rear of a school.

With samples taken from the crust of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, researchers have discovered where some of the oceans’ dissolved organic carbon winds up.

Lanternfish evolution provides unique insights into how deep-sea species might respond to commercial fishing.

As the only woman who has piloted the deep-ocean research submersible Alvin, Van Dover is among the few researchers to have explored hydrothermal vents firsthand.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History paleobiologist also studies the evolution of echolocation and special sensory structures in modern whales.

Four ways to study mutation rate, a crucial statistic in studies of evolution

From the difficulty of tracking rare populations to the danger of poachers exploiting distribution data, the complications of studying endangered species require creative solutions from researchers.

Take a break from the bench to puzzle and peruse.

Although highly controversial now, keeping orcas in captivity helped transform popular and scientific conceptions of the marine mammal from an unfeeling killer to a complex, intelligent animal.

The Challenger expedition's data on ocean temperatures and currents, seawater chemistry, life in the deep sea, and the geology of the seafloor spurred the rise of modern oceanography.