Life

The teeth of Strongylocentrotus purpuratus remain sharp through a lifetime of rock-scraping. But do they come with a matching fork for easy carving?

After fifteen years I've finally found the perfect writer's machine in the new 11.6-inch MacBook Air. It fuses together both the best software and hardware of which a writer could ever dream, while boasting all of the slender and effortless portability of a composition journal. It is a writer's terminal in the purest sense: with its excellent battery life, ephemeral weight, satisfying keyboard and instant-on capabilities, the new MacBook Air is perfectly suited to be the nexus into the inner chaos of my own thoughts, feelings, hang-ups, pretensions and emotions as a blank page. So why isn't writing any easier?

Mark Moffet explains how a botfly came to parasitize his skin�and how it escaped�illustrating in the process the extent of his commitment to the cause of biodiversity. Video (not for the squeamish) after the jump.

We know about Archaeopteryx lithographica thanks to an image-making process found in the Earth's crust.

On October 7th, 1930 � slender and bright; like a string tense and silent in anticipation of the purpose of her note � Beatrice Warde was introduced to the British Typographer's Guild. The speech she gave would change the way people thought about type for the next fifty years... and should be burnt into the flesh of anyone who is making a gadget to this day.

On the Indonesian island of Flores, researchers have discovered the remains of a giant bird that might have preyed on the mysterious and controversial Homo floresiensis, an extinct, diminutive close relative of modern humans.

By studying the search algorithms of ants, researchers are discovering ways of making computer networks faster and smarter.

Unless you grew up in the muds of Mono Lake, you had better be careful opening that box.

Eyes in the darkness and a snowstorm in reverse, players in an ecological chamber play.

NPR's Robert Krulwich reports on an astonishing finding: blindfolded, no one can walk in a straight line.