Life

Robust and primitive, is the GIF the nematode of online imagery? it's as if C. elegans had swum down through the aeons to intersect with an image-making format engineered to express its qualities.

G. K. Chesterton: "The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth."

GOOD's Nicola Twilley wonders how the industrial analysis of qualities like texture, consistency, and juiciness will transform age-old culinary cultures, in the second in a joint series exploring the science and technology of food.

Bacteria-like microbes trapped in salt crystals in the ancient sediments of California's Saline Valley may have survived for tens of thousands of years.

Foxes may see more than we know: if a team of wildlife biologists is right, they could use magnetic cues to help them judge their predatory leaps.

Whatever advantages fully modern humans enjoyed over their Neanderthal neighbors, lifespan was not among them, according to a new study of the longevity of our Pleistocene predecessors.

Japanese artist Kazumasa Nagai's posters put animal spirits at the heart of a floating modern world.

The people of the Siberian taiga, like the creatures they hunt and trap, are kept busy trying not to get bloodied or frozen, in a documentary narrated by Werner Herzog. Video after the jump.

While most of us use one side of the brain to play chess, the minds of masters of the game solve moves by parallel processing.

Cat versus bear cub: sentimental romp, or nature red in tooth and claw? Watching the two tangle playfully in a Russian hunting camp, the line is hard to draw. Video after the jump.