The Economist

“AN INORDINATE fondness for beetles.” That was the reply of J.B.S. Haldane, a British scientific polymath of the early 20th century, when he was asked if there were anything that […]

SET a thief to catch a thief is an old proverb. In the 1920s, shortly after the discovery of viruses, it was put to good use by doctors. They found […]

Darwin’s finches are an example of adaptive radiation, in which a single species splits into several that are able to occupy different ecological niches. Biologists have, however, long debated whether […]

The minuscule white blob at left in the image above is Beagle 2, Britain’s first (and so far only) Mars probe, which vanished after entering the Martian atmosphere on Christmas […]

The coming year will be crunch time for humanity’s understanding of the universe

The biggest study so far finds that GM crops have large, widespread benefits