Features

A small town in California was hit by earthquakes once every 22 years for over a century, setting the stage for a major seismic experiment in the 1980s and 90s. But the quake ended up being 11 years late. In this excerpt from "When Worlds Quake," geophysicist Hrvoje Tkalčić looks at why predicting earthquakes is so difficult.

Earth from space A 2025 satellite image shows a series of ghostly ice swirls sculpted on the surface of Lake Michigan by strong winds during an extreme cold snap that covered Chicago in a blanket of snow.

Stone Age people in Macedonia created goddess figurines whose bottom half was a house.

A strange, sandwich-shaped object is giving astronomers a rare view of the chaotic birthplaces of planets.

The oldest river predates the dinosaurs. But how do we know this?

The hydrochloric acid in your stomach can burn through metal — so why doesn't it burn through your stomach?

The Avenue of the Baobabs preserves the remnant trees of an ancient tropical forest on Madagascar.

Sophie Germain was a brilliant, self-taught mathematician who won one of France's most prestigious prizes, yet she declined to attend the award ceremony because the committee members didn't respect her work.

A man visited a hospital because of bladder discomfort, and his doctors discovered a remarkably large bladder stone.

Earth from space A 2016 astronaut photo of the Bahamas shows a series of luminous, rippling sandbanks partly carved out by a coral reef. The image also reveals subtle differences in the ocean's surface caused by a steep, hidden ocean drop-off.