William Hyde Wollaston made an astonishing number of discoveries in an astonishingly varied number of fields: platinum metallurgy, the existence of ultraviolet radiation, the chemical elements palladium and rhodium, the amino acid cystine, and the ph...

Cradled among the world's highest mountains – and sheltering one of its most devout religious communities – Tibet is, for many of us, an ultimate destination, a place that touches the heavens, a place only barely in our world, at its very end. In rec...

Skittering figures of urban legend – and a ubiquitous reality – cockroaches are nearly as abhorred as they are ancient. Even as our efforts to exterminate them have developed into ever more complex forms of chemical warfare, roaches' basic design of...

The interactions between apex predators and their prey are some of the most awesome and meaningful in nature – displays of strength, endurance, and a deep coevolutionary history. And there is perhaps no apex predator more impressive and important in...

For most, the term "public space" conjures up images of large, open areas: community centers for meetings and social events; the ancient Greek agora for political debates; green parks for festivals and recreation. In many of the world's major cities,...

For more than thirty years, the "History of Cartography Project" has charted the course for scholarship on cartography, bringing together research from a variety of disciplines on the creation, dissemination, and use of maps".Volume 6, Cartography in...

When Richard Nixon signed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971, eighty million acres were flagged as possible national park land. Field expeditions were tasked with recording what was contained in these vast acres. Under this decree, five...

The idea of a missing link between humanity and our animal ancestors predates evolution and popular science and actually has religious roots in the deist concept of the Great Chain of Being. Yet, the metaphor has lodged itself in the contemporary ima...

The comparative physiology of seemingly disparate organisms often serves as a surprising pathway to biological enlightenment. How appropriate, then, that Robert Elsner sheds new light on the remarkable physiology of diving seals through comparison wi...

In the years since the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit and Rover first began transmitting images from the surface of Mars, we have become familiar with the harsh, rocky, rusty-red Martian landscape. But those images are much less straightforward than t...