High on a mountain in late spring, a patch of snow can suddenly look as though someone spilled watermelon juice across it. The surface turns pale pink, rose red or even crimson, sometimes stretching for meters across a snowfield. Explorers...
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Few wildlife events are as disturbing as a whale stranding. An animal exquisitely adapted to life in deep water suddenly lies helpless on a beach, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside doz...
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A solitary desert locust can spend its life trying to avoid other locusts. Put enough of them together, however, and something extraordinary begins to happen. The insects become more active,...
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Your passport knows exactly how old you are. Your cells are a more complicated matter. Two people born on the same day can reach middle age with very different cardiovascular health, physica...
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On most nights, Americans who want to see the northern lights need to travel a very long way north. Then the Sun becomes unusually active, NOAA issues a geomagnetic-storm watch or warning, a...
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There is ordinary tiredness—the heavy-eyed feeling after a late night, a long flight or an exhausting week—and then there is the more puzzling question: Why am I tired all the time? You slee...
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On a clear Arctic night, the sky can begin almost imperceptibly. A pale band appears above the horizon, faint enough to be mistaken for a cloud. Then it brightens. The band folds into curtai...
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When Iñupiat hunters and biologists began finding ancient weapon fragments inside bowhead whales harvested in Arctic Alaska, the discoveries posed an extraordinary question: how long had the...
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In North Pole, Alaska, the holiday spirit is a year-round affair. Streets have festive names like Santa Claus Lane, and residents often decorate their homes with Christmas lights regardless...
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In the remote town of Longyearbyen, Norway, it's famously illegal to die due to permafrost preserving bodies. But did you know there's a U.S. town with a similar law? Welcome to Barrow, Ala...
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