There is no shortage of mosquitoes in North America, and adding one more variety might seem like just a minor uptick in summertime’s itchy-scratchy. But the Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus, comes with some particularly irritating characteristics. It’s an aggressive hit-and-run biter that frequently lives in close contact with humans. It’s a daytime feeder that dines on humans, ... 06.13.13 | more >>

James Gathany/CDC

At 5 a.m. last Fourth of July, Flip Tanedo rolled out of bed after an hour of repeatedly smacking his alarm clock’s snooze button. Rousting himself at dawn would be worth it, he hoped, because what he was about to hear was likely to have a huge bearing on the course of his career. Tanedo, a fifth-year theoretical physics Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University, tuned in to a live video feed ... 06.13.13 | more >>

From left: Murdo Macleod; courtesy of Xiaoyue Guo

There are rocks from the moon, rocks from Mars — and now, just maybe, a rock from Mercury.

In early 2012, a nomad in the western Sahara spotted some green stones scattered on the sand. Knowing that the empty desert was a good place to find rocks from space, and that meteorite dealers would pay good money for them, he picked up about three dozen that looked related. 06.13.13 | more >>

S. Ralew

Chantelle, 20 years old and 29 weeks into her third pregnancy, was sitting in John Kingdom’s office at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital waiting for a prescription. Her blood pressure was high. Her developing baby, a girl, weighed about 500 grams but at this point should have weighed closer to 1,300 grams. 05.30.13 | more >>

Nicolle Rager Fuller

View the slideshow Imagine if your best knowledge of human anatomy came from viewing the body through binoculars from a mile away. You might make out the shape of a hand, but knuckles and fingernails would elude you. Experiments could tell you there’s a pumping heart inside, but to see that heart with any clarity you would have to fix it in formaldehyde or liquid nitrogen, blast it with ... 05.28.13 | more >>

Top: L. Schermelleh/Univ. of Oxford; Bottom: J. Stout/Indiana Univ.; Bottom, right: Andrew Syred/Science Source

In its idealized form, science resembles a championship boxing match. Theories square off, each vying for the gold belt engraved with “Truth.” Under the stern eyes of a host of referees, one theory triumphs by best explaining available evidence — at least until the next bout. But in the real world, science sometimes works more like a fashion show. Researchers clothe plausible ... 05.16.13 | more >>

James Porto/Getty Images, James Group Studios/iStockphoto, adapted by S. Egts

When chemists Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi started fiddling with cornstarch, the powder made from the dense insides of corn kernels, their intention was to turn glucose, which is easily produced from the starch, into fructose, which is sweeter. The idea wasn’t that far-fetched. The two sugar molecules are cousins, both made from the same atomic parts slightly rearranged. 05.16.13 | more >>

Carolyn Sewell

Daniel Lathrop spent seven years and $2 million building the stainless steel sphere in his laboratory. It’s two spheres, actually — nestled one within the other like a pair of Russian dolls. Only these dolls contain 12 tons of molten metal and spin independently at astonishing speeds. 05.02.13 | more >>

Santiago Andrés Triana

Steve Haddock remembers every detail about his first ocean encounter with a comb jelly. The open water was a bottomless deep blue. The animal, about the size of a tennis ball, shimmered with bioluminescence. “It was just cruising along like a hover craft,” says Haddock, a marine biologist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, Calif. “Comb jellies are more alien ... 05.02.13 | more >>

Clockwise from top left: L.L. Moroz & M. Citarella/Univ. of Florida; Dimijian Greg/Getty Images; © Ingo Arndt/Minden Pictures/Corbis; Boris Pamikov/Shutterstock; Dimijian Greg/Getty Images; Casey Dunn/Brown Univ.

Here’s a climate puzzle — one that goes back to Earth’s infancy some 4.5 billion to 2.5 billion years ago. The sun was much dimmer back then. Far less solar radiation reached the planet. Earth should have been a frozen wasteland. But all geologic signs point to a young planet awash in liquid water, with the first life-forms emerging. Scientists call this conundrum the “faint young sun ... 04.18.13 | more >>

Nicolle Rager Fuller

Zola the crow is about to face a test that has baffled animals from canaries to dogs.

She’s a wild New Caledonian crow, and for the first time, she’s seeing a tidbit of meat dangling on a long string tied to a stick. She perches on the stick, bends down, grabs the string with her beak and pulls. But the string is too long. The meat still hangs out of reach. 04.18.13 | more >>

Mick Sibley/Univ. of Auckland

Brain research has been on a lot of minds lately in the nation’s capital. After offering a brief shout-out to Alzheimer’s research in his February State of the Union address, President Barack Obama went a step further in April by announcing a decade-long effort to develop advanced tools for tracking human brain activity. The administration dubbed it the Brain Research through Advancing ... 04.18.13 | more >>

Laboratory of Neuro Imaging/UCLA

If all goes according to Mike Dunne’s plan, the United States will build its first nuclear fusion power plant by the end of the next decade. Sixteen times a second, as the National Ignition Facility's program director for laser fusion energy envisions it, a two-millimeter-wide capsule of cryogenic hydrogen will drop into a steel chamber and get zapped by a 384-beam laser. Matter will ... 04.04.13 | more >>

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

There are two vaccines that guard against human papilloma­virus, and they are in rare company among medical inventions — the vaccines prevent cancer. Only the hepatitis B vaccine can make the same claim. Cancer-causing HPV can trigger abnormal cell growth on the cervix, and cervical cancer still kills up to 4,000 U.S. women each year. The virus is also implicated in cancers occurring in the ... 04.04.13 | more >>

© Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters/Corbis

MCMURDO STATION, ANTARCTICA — Even when the December sun beats down 24 hours a day, most of Antarctica remains cold, if not brutally frigid. With one dramatic exception. Wind-blown clouds of steam rise year-round from a lava lake atop Mount Erebus, the planet’s southernmost active volcano. 03.20.13 | more >>

George Steinmetz/Corbis

Like many women with parents of the Mad Men generation, Susan Murphy grew up in a household full of cigarette smoke. Both dad and mom smoked heavily, even while Murphy was still in her mother’s womb. 03.20.13 | more >>

Bobbieo/Getty Images

Herb Dragert didn’t know what to make of his wayward station.

In the early days of GPS satellites, Dragert had set up four benchmarks in the bedrock of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, to watch how their positions changed over time. Maybe, he thought, he could capture the ground moving during the earthquakes that occasionally shake the Pacific Northwest. 03.07.13 | more >>

Pacific Northwest Geodetic Array/Central Washington Univ.

It looked like a lost cause: a 61-year-old patient with advanced pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest diagnoses. Ordinarily, doctors wouldn’t have much choice. They could try chemotherapy drugs one at a time to see if any worked, or they could slam the tumor with a cocktail of chemicals that had shown some success with similar cases. 03.07.13 | more >>

Mary Calvert/The New York Times/Redux Pictures

Daisy Martin didn’t seem sick. Come dinnertime, she was as ravenous as ever. And at the sight of a new toy, she danced around in excited circles, same as always. Then one day, when Daisy was 8 years old, one of her family members noticed a lump, and then others, on the side of Daisy’s neck, beneath her fur. The diagnosis was devastating: T-cell lymphoma, a cancer so merciless that ... 02.21.13 | more >>

Elke Vogelsang/Getty Images

Joshua Pearce takes unusual satisfaction in strolling through Walmart. The shelves laden with toys, household items, tools and clothing inspire in him a certain smugness, a pride in American entrepreneurship. But it’s not because Pearce admires the chain as an empire built by a self-made man. Pearce swells with pride at Walmart because the store is full of mass-manufactured objects that he ... 02.20.13 | more >>

Eva Kolenko/3D Systems

Psychiatry seemed poised on the edge of a breakthrough. In early 2011, after decades of no radically new drugs, a fundamentally different schizophrenia treatment promised relief from the psychotic hallucinations and delusions plaguing people with the disease. The new compound, devised by chemists at Eli Lilly and Co., hit a target in the brain that older medicines had ignored. 02.07.13 | more >>

Michael Morgenstern