The handbones seen in the whale model in the center of this image tell the curious story of how whales went from land to water.

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What’s a “Missing Link”?

While some still use the term, experts abhor it because it implies that life is a linear hierarchy

Many animals, like this red sphinx cat, are bred to be hairless. Other times, animal baldness is a symptom of stress and other factors.

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Do Other Animals Besides Humans Go Bald?

From Andean bears to Rhesus macaques, non-human mammals have hair woes of their own

A replica of Foucault's famous experiment at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e Tecnica in Milan, Italy

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How Does Foucault’s Pendulum Prove the Earth Rotates?

This elegant scientific demonstration has been delighting everyday people for nearly 200 years

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Can All Living Things Exhibit Albinism?

You asked, we answered

What's a dinosaur, anyways? The answer is in the evolutionary tree.

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What Makes a Dinosaur a Dinosaur?

The question may sound like a “duh,” but it gets to the heart of how we categorize and define nature

A NASA image of Hurricane Sandy moving along the United States' East Coast. Extreme weather events like this are becoming more frequent, but scientists still face challenges when attributing any one storm to climate change.

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Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Events?

It’s a challenge to attribute any one storm or heat wave to climate change, but scientists are getting closer

Coastal regions and islands are vanishing due to a lethal combination of erosion, sea rise and subsidence, or the slow sinking of land over time. The network of 1200 coral islands and atolls that makes up the Maldives in the Indian Ocean is ground zero.

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What Are All The Ways That Land Can Disappear Beneath Your Feet?

From sinkholes to liquefaction, we look at how solid earth can shrink and elude our grasp

Ornithologist John Gould's illustrations of finches collected by Charles Darwin on the Galápagos Islands show the physical differences that the men relied on in dividing them into different species.

Future of Conservation

What Does It Mean to Be a Species? Genetics Is Changing the Answer

As DNA techniques let us see animals in finer and finer gradients, the old definition is falling apart

On May 6, 1937, the German airship Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, while the airship was landing.

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What Really Felled the Hindenburg?

On the anniversary of the conflagration, mysteries still remain

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