Science Writing

If you’ve ever tried to glue together a model, assemble a piece of furniture, or even cook a complicated recipe, you know that seamlessly fitting its parts can be a challenge.

It’s an unnerving thought: tiny worms burrowing into your skin, living in your veins and arteries, wreaking havoc on your body from the inside out. But it’s reality for the millions around the world who suffer from schistosomiasis, a disease caused by a genus of parasitic worms called Schistosoma.

When it comes to climate change research, a lot of the news is bad. The planet is warming, seas are rising, and much of life on Earth is struggling to respond—but there are a few examples of organisms swimming against that current.

Have you ever remembered an obscure fact and wondered how your brain held onto it? Despite a nervous system very different from our own, one of the Marine Biological Laboratory’s (MBL) most famous research organisms can also form memories.

Do state game agencies really introduce rattlesnakes by tossing them out of aircraft? Three experts weigh in on the facts, origin, and future of the enduring story.

It was a picture-perfect August day on Cape Cod when the boat anchor came up caked with black sludge. From the depths of Popponesset Creek came the alien-looking goo, an unpleasant-smelling substance that Nicole Corbett said was mostly made of decomposing Gracilaria tikvahiae, a seaweed found in nutrient-rich waters.

A week after Mary E. Keleher made a discovery that shocked the birding community, she recounted seeing someone on crutches, with his left leg in a boot, making his way down South Cape Beach to lay eyes on her discovery: the first lesser sand-plover ever seen in Massachusetts.

Every year, several of Mashpee’s rivers are ground zero for an epic piscine journey: scores of herring, guided by an innate biological compass, make a springtime swim all the way from the ocean to the same Mashpee ponds in which they were born.