The northeast Pacific Ocean is home to an astonishing array of marine creatures—spiky urchins, multiarmed sea stars, soft sea slugs the color of lemons, and barnacles with their heads glued to rocks. Strolling the seashore or diving below the ocean’s surface, we can see the adult forms of these creatures, but what about their earlier stages? Before...

Killer whales occasionally find themselves where they don’t belong. In the Arctic, they routinely get stuck on the wrong side of encroaching sea ice. Or they swim into an enclosed space at high tide, their escape cut off when the water recedes—as in the case of kʷiisaḥiʔis (Brave Little Hunter), a young female killer whale that recently became trapped...

Every year, thousands of tourists from around the world visit British Columbia’s coastal rivers in search of an exciting up-close experience with a grizzly bear. That is, every year except 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns closed most of the province’s ecotourism industry. The sudden absence of tourists here and around the world gave scientists an unprecedented...

Seaweed is versatile; it provides habitat for marine life, shelters coastlines, and absorbs carbon dioxide. But in the United States, scientists are setting out to see whether seaweed has another particularly valuable trick hidden up its proverbial sleeve: to act as a salty, slimy source of precious minerals. Within the US Department of Energy is...

For decades, the world’s commercial ships have depended on a fossil fuel so sticky and thick that it needs to be heated to around 150 °C just to get it to flow through a vessel’s innards. Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) is one of the dirtiest fuels out there. “It’s the last step of the [oil] refining process,” says Morten Bo Christiansen, head of the energy transition...

When I was a teenager, my parents bought a home near an old farm pond in Bangor, Maine. A family of muskrats lived there and would go about their business as I lazed on the dock; I didn’t pay them close attention, as they were hardly glamorous creatures, and in retrospect, I took them for granted. Nevertheless, I did appreciate their presence. On warm-season...