We’ll talk with the field biologist who tracks new threats, to jungle and stream, before they become pandemic.

Descartes said “I think, therefore I am.” Bestseller Russell Shorto reminds us it’s more complicated than that, in his new tale of faith, reason, and “Descartes’ Bones.”

Way faster than a speeding bullet, protons are whizzing through the Large Hadron Collider. Big Bangs, black holes, and the Great Beyond.

Physics and the presidency. A top scientist says our challenges require breakthroughs.

Robotic Mars exploration has been no picnic. Half of all Mars missions have ended in failure. But right now, the Mars Phoenix Lander is up there, well-landed, sending back astonishing images, and — it appears — shaking off its problems extending the eight-foot arm that will dig for ice.
The Phoenix is looking for conditions that [...]

Jill Price has a memory like few others in the world. She’s 42 years old, and she remembers everything.
Every instant of her life, and the life around her, since she was fourteen. Down to the smallest detail. Like a movie that never stops running. Whether she likes it or not. And not just what happened, [...]

Perfumes are more than a scent. They are a state of mind — at least that what all the ads tell us.
A little dab here and you’re picnicking in fields of wild flowers, or experiencing the blush of first love. A spritz there and you’re rolling in satin sheets, and feeling oh so Hollywood. Dab [...]

Science writer George Johnson is in love with the science of the old days — before super-colliders and supercomputers and terabytes of data to be churned.
When he thinks of the beauty of science, he thinks of the simple, shattering experiments of Galileo and Newton, Pavlov and Faraday.
Until very recently, he says, the most earthshaking science [...]

For a long time in life, Alzheimer’s seems like somebody else’s problem. An issue for the unfortunate old. A misty, separate continent of life.
And then, it can hit you. Your own parents, needing help. Losing their grip. Your own odds of following them into Alzheimer’s — higher than you’d ever wish.
One in 10 people get [...]

Last week, in the frozen north of Norway, the seeds began to pour into the Global Seed Vault — the “doomsday vault,” some have called it. Five hundred feet of a super-secure cave in an Arctic mountainside is filling now with millions of seeds from all over the world.
As climate change and genetic engineering put [...]

For a long, long time, the world’s oceans have seemed just too vast to be seriously affected by the hand of humankind. The endless rolling waves, the briny depths, the creatures beyond number — all these seemed to dwarf our footprints on the beach and ships at sea.
No more. A new global mapping of human [...]

There are headaches, and then there are migraines — gut-wrenching, brain-throbbing assaults to the head. They’re hard for most people to imagine, but for 30 million Americans, they’re a fact of life.
Once dismissed as psychosomatic, ‘in your head’ disorders, migraines are now gaining top billing as a disease and a public health issue. And if [...]

Maybe we don’t want everything to boil down to science, but scientists keep chipping away at the mystery of everything we see and do. Now, they’re burrowing in on love.
You may think it’s moonlight and roses. They see evolutionary biology and neurotransmitters. Ninety-seven percent of mammals don’t pair up to raise their young. We humans [...]

Mike Huckabee may not believe in evolution, but Neil Shubin does. He’s been there and seen it in the fossil record of hundreds of millions of years, from the Arctic to rural Pennsylvania.
Now the University of Chicago paleontologist wants to introduce you to the ancestors: worms and reptiles, and, above all, the fish whose prehistoric [...]

Six weeks ago today was a big day for me. I’d had a little tightness in the chest, a little trip to the doctor. And six weeks ago they threw me on a hospital gurney, slapped on the oxygen mask, and cut my chest open for heart bypass surgery.
I was lucky. No heart attack. No [...]

If you hadn’t noticed, you’re not looking. We live in the era of pervasive cosmetic surgery. Everybody nipped and tucked and botoxed and lipo-sucked to a fare-the-well.
Look around at the “trout pout” lips and “wind tunnel” facelifts, the Kabuki zone of expressionless brows, the gravity-defying fronts and rears and rows of paint-white teeth — and [...]

He’s been called “the Indiana Jones of conservation.” Alan Rabinowitz, a wildlife biologist and big-cat expert, has traveled the world from Belize to Borneo, Thailand to Laos, and risked his life to save jaguars, clouded leopards, and tigers.
Now, in Myanmar, he’s established the world’s largest tiger preserve, in an effort to save the world’s dwindling [...]

Nobel Laureate James Watson set off a fury when he questioned whether Africans have the same intelligence as Caucasians.
So did journalist William Saletan, who defended Watson in a recent three-part series on race and IQ for Slate magazine, and highlighted research championed by white supremacists.
Saletan has apologized. But discomforting questions remain in the air.
We’ve invited [...]

It sounds like a sci-fi nightmare: scientists bring back to life ancient deadly viruses that once wiped out vast numbers of the human race for research purposes only, of course. And where do they go to find those extinct diseases? Deep within our own genome.
Long ago, some of the viruses that didn’t kill us got [...]

In Alan Lightman’s new novel, “Ghost,” you’re never quite sure what to believe.
But Lightman, a theoretical physicist who a decade ago gave us the bestselling novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” knows what he’s up to. He wants to explore the edges of belief — both religious and scientific.
David, his protagonist, works at a funeral home, and one [...]

Human beings are nothing if not emotional animals. Jerome Kagan, one of the country’s most prominent psychologists, has spent a lifetime untangling the complexities of our brains.
Now he’s out with a fascinating new book looking at our emotions: What’s hard wired and what’s not; how gender, age, religion, nationality and class all affect our interactions [...]