The eastern black rail, a subspecies of bird that’s scattered in clusters along America’s eastern coastlines, is one of the most elusive creatures a wildlife biologist can choose to study. Adults are the size of a human hand, and are dark and shy,…

BEASTS BEFORE US The Untold Story of Mammal Origins and Evolution By Elsa Panciroli Richard Owen loathed small mammals, calling them “ratlike, shrewlike forms of the most stupid and unintelligent order of sucklers.” That wouldn’t have mattered if…

As winters grow warmer in North America, thirsty ticks are on the move. We found the moose calf half an hour in. He lay atop thin snow on a gentle slope sheltered by the boughs of a big, black spruce, curled up as a dog would on a couch. He had…

Sheila Advento was not feeling well. It was July 6, 2003, and her mother’s house in northern New Jersey was filled with people. Sheila and her mom were there, along with Sheila’s boyfriend, sister, and brother-in-law—a slice of a huge extended…

Some medical experiments are more daunting than others. The one that the neurologist Helen Mayberg came up with to test a model of depression she had developed over about 15 years involved drilling two holes in the top of a patient’s skull and…

Feature stories, read aloud: Download the Audm app for your iPhone. I. The Fabric of Reality By the time Nev Jones entered DePaul University's esteemed doctoral program in philosophy, she had aced virtually every course she ever took, studied five…

(“The Evolution of Beauty” by Richard Prum was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2017. For the rest of the list, click here.) For readers, Charles Darwin, born in 1809, apparently never gets old. Books by Darwin…

A few years ago, Gene Robinson, of Urbana, Illinois, asked some associates in southern Mexico to help him kidnap some 1,000 newborns. For their victims they chose bees. Half were European honeybees, Apis mellifera ligustica, the sweet-tempered kind…

Frustrated by the failures in his field, Tom Insel, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is now trying to reduce the world’s anguish through the devices in people’s pockets. Sometime around 2010, about two-thirds of the way…

David Dobbs extols a history of New York's Bellevue hospital, a crucible of discovery in medicine. To many Americans, the name Bellevue signifies 'psychiatric facility' as much as Bedlam does to Britons. The psychiatric unit of the New York City…

From the day Christian Guardino was born, his mother, Elizabeth, knew that something was wrong with his eyes. They would jiggle and jerk and roll up into his head. One eye turned inward. When she fed him, instead of gazing up at her, Christian would…

Sara Bostock once sent me a picture of her and her daughter Cecily in happier times, and it’s a happy shot indeed: mother and daughter, 40-something and 20-something, outdoors in the sun, looking radiant. With their beaming smiles—the same smile,…

“Soon enough,” Alice Dreger writes at the beginning of her romp of a book, “I will get to the death threats, the sex charges, the alleged genocides, the epidemics, the alien abductees, the anti-lesbian drug, the unethical ethicists, the fight with…

Of Christine Kenneally’s father’s father — a man neither Kenneally nor her father ever knew, a man who did the deed requisite to reproduction and promptly vanished — she asks, “Did he leave anything more significant than the loud bang of a door shut…

In his 2007 book “A Farewell to Alms,” the economic historian Gregory Clark argued that the English came to rule the world largely because their rich outbred their poor, and thus embedded their superior genes and values throughout the nation. In her…

To understand the violent criminal, says Richard E. Tremblay, imagine a 2-year-old boy doing the things that make the terrible twos terrible — grabbing, kicking, pushing, punching, biting. Now imagine him doing all this with the body and resources of…

The United States Food and Drug Administration is not known for its prose. So the warning letter that it sent to 23andMe, the direct-to-consumer genetic-testing company, on November 22nd, was a surprise in more ways than one. “It reads like the…

A few years ago, Gene Robinson, of Urbana, Illinois, asked some associates in southern Mexico to help him kidnap some 1,000 newborns. For their victims they chose bees. Half were European honeybees, Apis mellifera ligustica, the sweet-tempered kind…

On average, about 700 Americans kill themselves each week — but in the fine-weather weeks of May and June, the toll rises closer to 800, sometimes higher. Every year, suicide peaks with the tulips and lilacs — increasing roughly 15 percent over the…

Below find #10 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party here at Wired — the final of run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s stay here, posted on the eve of my departure to more homegrown pastures at my own site. (Details on my move are at…