In southern New Mexico lies the Tularosa Basin, an oblong bowl that’s home to a natural sandbox: White Sands National Park. In 2005, David Bustos came to White Sands to work as a National Park Service ...

At the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan, snowboarding made its debut as an Olympic sport. No longer relegated to the fringes, snowboarders took to the snow-capped peaks of Mount Yakebitai, and 26 ...

Chris Mazurek was a freshman in college when he had a dream that he was inside the Legends of Zelda video game. He saw himself as the main protagonist, Link, in third person. Suddenly, beeping noises ...

Imagine a website that reviewed narcotics. Imagine that people who were really into methamphetamine or heroin could go to one of dozens of sites to weigh the pros and cons of each drug. Imagine these ...

At some point or another, most of us have played travel agent to a dandelion. Blowing on their tufted tops is a childhood rite of passage for many, and a simple puff of air is all it takes to send the ...

If a theory doesn’t make a testable prediction, it isn’t science. It’s a basic axiom of the scientific method, dubbed “falsifiability” by the 20th century philosopher of science Karl Popper. General ...

For more than three centuries, a plague of unshakable lethargy blanketed the American South. It began with “ground itch,” a prickly tingling in the tender webs between the toes, which was soon ...

Fifteen years ago or so, when Helen Sang , a geneticist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, and her colleagues wanted to get a gene into a chicken, the process was anything but fast. They would ...

Leonardo da Vinci dissected some 30 cadavers in his lifetime, leaving behind a trove of beautiful—and accurate—anatomical drawings. Leonardo da Vinci's extensive studies of human anatomy were hundreds ...

Once you’ve seen a slime mold—its gooey, delicately branching structure oozing in a vaguely unsettling way along a log or leaf—you’re unlikely to forget it. They’re unmistakable because there’s ...

Receive emails about upcoming NOVA programs and related content, as well as featured reporting about current events through a science lens. The engineer whips out a protractor and straightedge. That’s ...

In November of 1978, an observer in a Boston institution hurriedly scrawled down a short note that, unbeknownst to them, would eventually send waves through the research field of language development.