Health & Medicine
Explainer: What is cancer?
Cancer is a whole collection of diseases with one thing in common: all develop when the body’s cells start dividing out of control.
Featured Articles in this Issue
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Cover Story
Meet some of the longest-lived animals
Think a 100-year-old person is old? Not compared to the world’s longest-lived animals — some of which have lifespans of thousands of years.
Explainer
Technically Fiction
Planets
Here’s how future Martians might take their first breaths
Mars would need an atmosphere thick enough to hold heat and with enough oxygen for people to breathe. This is how we might terraform Mars.
Profile
Animals
Loss inspired this biologist to study aging
Juan Manuel Vazquez studies the anti-aging genes that have allowed some animals to evolve to live remarkably long lives.
Features
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A landslide in a Greenland fjord echoed around Earth for 9 days
Warming permafrost and glacial melt destabilized a fragile mountain slope, leading to a landslide-triggered tsunami in a fjord. Is this a sign of more to come?
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Meet some of the longest-lived animals
Think a 100-year-old person is old? Not compared to the world’s longest-lived animals — some of which have lifespans of thousands of years.
More Stories from the September 1, 2025 issue
- Animals
Some iguanas may have rafted across the Pacific 30 million years ago
The iguanas' epic 8,000-kilometer trip — one-fifth of Earth’s circumference — may be the longest made by a flightless land vertebrate.
- Physics
Physics finally explains the sound of clapping
The “Helmholtz resonator” concept is responsible for the sound produced by hand-clapping.
- Materials Science
A beautiful blue butterfly wing offers a new way to study cancer
Once a morpho butterfly wing is placed atop a thin slice of tissue, shining polarized light through it can help reveal how likely breast cancer is to spread.
- Microbes
Experiment: Yeasty beasties
It’s hard to believe a packet of dry yeast is full of living things. But feed the yeast the right things, and presto! You’ve got bubbly, oozing mess of life.
- Humans
Wiggling ears may have once helped boost human hearing
Ancient ear muscles may not help us hear today. They can, however, offer one readout of how hard someone is trying to listen.
- Animals
Butts of these fly larvae mimic a termite’s face
Young blowflies found in Morocco look — and smell — like the termites they hide amongst. These tricks help the larvae survive amongst the killers.
