We think we know how mountains form. Plate tectonics causes rock to be pushed up at fault boundaries. Except that model is hard to prove, and a new study suggests it might actually be a lot more complicated.

After Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet in 2006, our solar system went from having nine planets to eight. But about a decade later, some astronomers proposed there was another planet, larger than Earth, hiding in the Kuiper Belt. And in...

Some plants can drink water from the air - and that has some weird effects on the forests where they live.

The concept of warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals is outdated because there are actually tons of different animal thermoregulation strategies.

The human population of the world will soon peak – and then decrease – thanks to a combination of two quickly changing economic and educational trends.

In 1990, fossil collectors in South Dakota stumbled across a dinosaur that turned out to be a really big deal. Not just because it was a T. rex – basically the most popular dino out there – or because it ended up in Chicago’s famous...

Lots of geological forces need to come together for continents to form, but they all require one ingredient: water.

You may have heard of "abortion pills" - here's what these medications are and what they do (and don't do).

Volcanoes might seem like an unstoppable force of nature - but there is at least one OTHER force on Earth that seems to be able to keep them down.

There are two types of rain, and one of them is almost impossible to forecast.

We often use decibels, a measure of sound pressure, to describe how loud something is - but loudness is caused by how we perceive sounds, and the two often don't line up.

Most animals on earth are bioluminescent, but almost all of them live in the ocean - and scientists aren’t sure why.

How do you count things you don't know about?

Two mushroom guilds with vastly different strategies are locked in competition for forest dominance.

For thousands of years, water was thought to be an element. That is, until some of the greatest chemists in the world managed to crack it open.

Energy use can be confusing – I mean, how do you compare gasoline in your car to electricity piped to your house? That's why we made these things spud-tacularly simple.

Trees are a super-efficient way to sequester carbon, but since planting the wrong trees in the wrong place can do more harm than good, we need to go about tree planting more carefully.

Nuclear war is a terrifying existential threat, but we shouldn't only fear the blasts because the ensuing smoke is the real killer.

Methuselah’s environment lacks nutrients, water, and oxygen. In other words, it’s the perfect place to grow very very old.

By combining historical demography and epidemiology, we can (sort of) determine how people throughout history have died.

The shape of a farm can tell you a surprising amount about the land it's on and the people that use it.

When the brain receives pain from an internal organ, it often projects the pain in the wrong place because of the way sensory nerve paths converge

A simple mis-folding in a certain brain protein causes a disease for which we have no cure.

When it comes to the mating game, fish have some of the strangest ways of thwarting the competition.