Ben Guarino The Washington Post

Five years ago, on a remote island in Wales, University of Oxford scientist Annette Fayet spied a puffin doing something she had never seen before. The bird, floating on the seawater beneath a cliff, held a stick in its beak. It began to scratch its back with the stick - the puffin, as Fayet watched, was using a tool.

Archaeologists working in Indonesia say they have discovered the earliest artwork that depicts a story.

No one has locked eyes with a Denisovan for tens of thousands of years. These mysterious humans left behind few bones, unlike their close Neanderthal relatives, on their way to extinction. All the remains confirmed to be Denisovan - part of a pinkie finger, half a jawbone, some teeth - could rest comfortably in a shoe box.

The gunman who killed seven people and injured 23 others during an extended shooting rampage in western Texas on Saturday had been fired that day from his job, and he and his employer had both called police after his termination. But state troopers who pulled him over for a traffic violation before the shooting were unaware that he could pose a thr...

About 3.8 million years ago, a distant human relative took his final steps. Swept into a river delta, his head was buried in sand that, over time, hardened into a stone helmet. The skull fossilized within the sandstone, to the delight of the scientists who discovered the cranium in 2016.

The nine conservationists had embarked on one of the most ambitious wildlife projects in Iran in recent years, setting camera traps in seven provinces to monitor the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah, whose dwindling population stalks Iran's central plateau.

Denisovan and Neanderthals share a lineage that branched off from the ancestor of modern humans about 700,000 years ago. The two sister species then split apart about 300,000 years later.

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.

Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef.

The remarkable journey of a multimillion-dollar plan to remove plastic from the Pacific began with a teenager's TEDx talk. In 2012, 18-year-old Boyan Slat proposed an invention to collect garbage from the ocean's surface. His talk went viral.

If dinosaurs had possessed telescopes and the will to gaze skyward 100 million years ago, they might have seen a very different Saturn - one without its iconic rings. And if humans manage to survive another 100 million years, our descendants may also miss the discs of ice and dust that encircle the golden gas giant.

By their estimate, over the history of the universe, stars have emitted 4 times 10-to-the-84th-power photons into the visible universe (that's a 4 followed by 84 zeros).

In northeastern Brazil, in a forest so dry that the trees blanch bone-white, termites have been busy at work for millennia. The only external signs of their labor are dirt mounds, garbage dumps from their underground excavations. Dirt and garbage normally inspire as much awe as toenail clippings - but these are truly marvelous slag piles. The conic...

The oceans are loud and getting louder all the time. And marine mammals must live in the din. These animals take different approaches to the noise: Dolphins perform the equivalent of shouting. Humpback whales, when competing with a nearby boat, go silent.

On a sunny July morning, a group of teenagers gathered in a circle aboard a 71-foot research vessel named the Neeskay. The teens, members of a scientific mission called the Aquarius Project, cheered:

Five years ago, on a remote island in Wales, University of Oxford scientist Annette Fayet spied a puffin doing something she had never seen before. The bird, floating on the seawater beneath a cliff, held a stick in its beak. It began to scratch its back with the stick - the puffin, as Fayet watched, was using a tool.

Archaeologists working in Indonesia say they have discovered the earliest artwork that depicts a story.

No one has locked eyes with a Denisovan for tens of thousands of years. These mysterious humans left behind few bones, unlike their close Neanderthal relatives, on their way to extinction. All the remains confirmed to be Denisovan - part of a pinkie finger, half a jawbone, some teeth - could rest comfortably in a shoe box.

The gunman who killed seven people and injured 23 others during an extended shooting rampage in western Texas on Saturday had been fired that day from his job, and he and his employer had both called police after his termination. But state troopers who pulled him over for a traffic violation before the shooting were unaware that he could pose a thr...

About 3.8 million years ago, a distant human relative took his final steps. Swept into a river delta, his head was buried in sand that, over time, hardened into a stone helmet. The skull fossilized within the sandstone, to the delight of the scientists who discovered the cranium in 2016.

The nine conservationists had embarked on one of the most ambitious wildlife projects in Iran in recent years, setting camera traps in seven provinces to monitor the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah, whose dwindling population stalks Iran's central plateau.

Denisovan and Neanderthals share a lineage that branched off from the ancestor of modern humans about 700,000 years ago. The two sister species then split apart about 300,000 years later.

Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass.

Years ago, the small, ratlike rodents could be seen scurrying across the sand and coral rubble on the Australian island of Bramble Cay. Fishermen would sometimes see them while visiting the island, which is dotted with a few grass clumps, shorebirds and nesting sea turtles in the Great Barrier Reef.

The remarkable journey of a multimillion-dollar plan to remove plastic from the Pacific began with a teenager's TEDx talk. In 2012, 18-year-old Boyan Slat proposed an invention to collect garbage from the ocean's surface. His talk went viral.

If dinosaurs had possessed telescopes and the will to gaze skyward 100 million years ago, they might have seen a very different Saturn - one without its iconic rings. And if humans manage to survive another 100 million years, our descendants may also miss the discs of ice and dust that encircle the golden gas giant.

By their estimate, over the history of the universe, stars have emitted 4 times 10-to-the-84th-power photons into the visible universe (that's a 4 followed by 84 zeros).

In northeastern Brazil, in a forest so dry that the trees blanch bone-white, termites have been busy at work for millennia. The only external signs of their labor are dirt mounds, garbage dumps from their underground excavations. Dirt and garbage normally inspire as much awe as toenail clippings - but these are truly marvelous slag piles. The conic...

The oceans are loud and getting louder all the time. And marine mammals must live in the din. These animals take different approaches to the noise: Dolphins perform the equivalent of shouting. Humpback whales, when competing with a nearby boat, go silent.

On a sunny July morning, a group of teenagers gathered in a circle aboard a 71-foot research vessel named the Neeskay. The teens, members of a scientific mission called the Aquarius Project, cheered: