Stories by Stephanie Pappas

A Chinese start-up has stunned the technology industry—and financial markets—with a cheaper, lower-tech AI assistant that matches the state of the art

Wildfires like the Los Angeles blazes destroy so much, but they often spare some evidence of the cause of their ignition

In California and elsewhere, fast-moving fires are particularly damaging and expensive because they take people by surprise, making evacuations difficult

The oldest human genomes ever sequenced reveal that our Neandertal ancestry came from one “pulse” of interbreeding and pins down the timing

Plate tectonics, or the recycling of Earth’s crust, may have begun much earlier than previously thought—and may be a big reason that our planet harbors life

A finger-sized clay cylinder from a tomb in northern Syria appears to be the oldest example of writing using an alphabet rather than hieroglyphs or cuneiform

Compared with other arachnids, invasive Joro spiders are calm, cool and collected under stress, a new study shows

New drugs may help patients with life-threatening "brain-eating" amoeba infections

Cocaine has been detected in sharks for the first time, but scientists aren’t sure of the impact

Find new ways to fill the long summer days with these quick primers on 10 ancient games

Millions of hand-size Joro spiders are moving up the East Coast. Don’t panic

Enormous engraved rock art of anacondas, rodents and other animals along the Orinoco River in Colombia and Venezuela may have been used to mark territory 2,000 years ago

Extreme atoms are pushing the bounds of physics and chemistry

A giant sunspot cluster rivaling the one that caused the Carrington Event in 1859 could trigger a cannibal coronal mass ejection. But this is unlikely to cause major problems

Solar eclipse glasses prevent catastrophic eye damage when observing the sun. Here’s how they work

For the first time, scientists make detailed observations of a single killer whale killing a great white shark and then eating its liver

Researchers have created ultraheavy versions of elements that have never existed before on Earth

Charlotte, a stingray in a small North Carolina aquarium, is taking a DIY approach to reproduction

The total solar eclipse over North America this April is a great opportunity for kids to understand the dance of the Earth, sun and moon

Here’s why the path of a solar eclipse travels in the opposite direction of that of the sun

The most detailed global look at groundwater yet shows a lot of loss but also stories of success in restoring some aquifers

If holiday music seems designed in a lab to get stuck on repeat inside your head for all of December, well, it kind of is

The genes of microbes living as deep as 1.5 kilometers below the surface reveal a split between minimalist and maximalist lifestyles

Our planet’s crust has been shifting and sliding for four billion years, a new study suggests