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HIGH IN THE MOUNTAINS OF WESTERN ETHIOPIA. AN ISOLATED CHRISTIAN COMMUNITY CLINGS TO AN ANCIENT WAY OF LIFE [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] 'We were very tired,' Sebastiao Salgado recalls. He was on [...]

During WWII, 120,000 Japanese-Americans were forced into camps. The injustice still haunts victims and their descendants JANE YANAGI DIAMOND TAUGHT AMERICAN HISTORY at a California high school, 'but I couldn't [...]

IN WARTIME, THE U.S. MILITARY DEPENDS ON LOCALS TO NAVIGATE THE LANGUAGE AND CULTURE. BUT WHAT HAPPENS TO THOSE INTERPRETERS WHEN WE LEAVE? SAKHIDAD AFGHAN WAS 19 WHEN HE STARTED [...]

JAMEY STILLINGS HAS BEEN a professional photographer since 1983. His work has taken him across the country and to Nicaragua, India and the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu. In [...]

EUDORA WELTY was one of the grandest grande dames of American letters--winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, an armful of O. Henry Awards and the […]

This is stanley kubrick's future: we're just living in it. In 2001: A Space Odyssey, releasad 50 Aprils ago, the renowned director gave visual form to an astonishing collection of [...]

There have been plenty of Trials of the Century in American history, but the prosecution of Jefferson Davis for treason would surely have taken the 19th-century title--if it had happened. [...]

MOST AMERICANS VIEW THE TECHNOLOGY-driven future with a sense of hope. They just don't want to live there. That paradoxical view--future technology sounds awesome, hut it's not for me--is one [...]

One day in 1987, Joseph Rodriguez was out taking photographs in Spanish Harlem. 'It was a rough neighborhood then,' Rodriguez says. 'There were a lot of drugs.' When he met [...]

WITHIN THE NEXT 40 YEARS, MOST AMERICANS BELIEVE, the United States will get the bulk of its energy from sources other than oil. Computers will converse like people. Cancer will [...]

One hundred and fifty years ago this month, President Abraham Lincoln launched the greatest land giveaway in U.S. history and destined Ken Deardorff for one of the longest nights of [...]

The bedrooms below belonged to Army Pfc. Karina S. Lau of Livingston, California (bottom), and Marine Cpl. Nicholas G. Xiarhos of Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts. Their parents kept the rooms intact [...]

Early humans knew the importance of a good night's sleep. Archaeologists led by the University of the Witwatersrand uncovered the oldest-known mattress, in a South African rock shelter. Made of [...]

A species of Yeti crab (Kiwa puravida) recently discovered at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean may be the world's deepest farmer. Scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in [...]

The corvids--jays, crows and ravens--make tools, cooperate and hide food from potential thieves. Now researchers in the Austrian Alps have observed ravens gesturing. In male-female pairs, one bird picked up [...]

After a drought in the West several years ago, aspen trees started dying in large numbers. The drought ended, but 'sudden aspen decline' continued and now affects 17 percent of [...]

Near the end of the last ice age, a group of hunters in Washington State bagged a mastodon. A new Texas A&M University-led study of a mastodon rib--with a projectile [...]

Orcinus orca LIVES: In the Antarctic (a population known as type B), feeding on seals and penguins. BEELINES: Occasionally for the subtropical waters off Uruguay and Brazil, a study documents [...]

How can a woodpecker repeatedly bang its head into a tree at 15 miles per hour without harming itself? Researchers from Beihang University in Beijing and elsewhere, using high-speed video, [...]

In nursery web spiders (below), a male gives a potential mate an insect wrapped in silk. When a sneaky guy wraps up a fake offering, such as an inedible seed, [...]

Lions, orcas, hyenas, some hawks and a few other species hunt collaboratively, and now researchers have added a fish to that list. Yellow saddle goatfish (above) in the Red Sea [...]

Neanderthals had relatively short limbs, a common adaptation to cold climates. An analysis from Johns Hopkins University suggests stubby shins also made them well suited for their mountainous Eurasian terrain. [...]

Pygocentrus nattereri BARKS: When confronting another piranha face to face. DRUMS: When circling another piranha for a fight, especially over food. SNAPS: Its jaws shut loudly when it tries to [...]

Among southern elephant seals, four-ton alpha males lord over harems ashore and block other males from mating with the hundreds of females. But P.J.N. de Bruyn of the University of [...]

Native to the Galapagos Islands, Nazca boobies nest in huge, crowded colonies, where adults frequently bite and peck their neighbors' chicks. A Wake Forest University-led study shows that the birds [...]

Nocturnal millipedes in the genus Motyxia glow in the dark (above). But why? Being blind, they're not lighting up to impress one another. Scientists collected 164 millipedes from Giant Sequoia [...]

HEEDS: The whoops of intruding hyenas when they are played through loudspeakers in the wild, at least in a study by Michigan State University researchers. COUNTS: The number of hyenas [...]

When Central America rose from the ocean three million years ago, horn snails divided into two species, one in the Pacific and one in the Atlantic. Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute [...]

King crabs have come to the Antarctic shelf. Frigid water kept them away for millions of years, but now the region is warming up, says Craig Smith of the University [...]

To reproduce, the parasite Toxoplasma gondii needs to get from a rat into a cat. It's known that infected rats don't fear the scent of cat urine. New research led [...]

Most of what we know about dinosaurs comes from their fossils. But a University of Alberta research team recently found a different kind of evidence: 11 feathers preserved in amber. [...]

Mother bears have a fierce reputation, but they're not the ones to worry about. Researchers led by the University of Calgary analyzed 59 fatal black bear attacks in the United [...]

Researchers studying the box jellyfish Tripedalia cystophora in Puerto Rico observed that four of the species' 24 eyes always point up.The translucent eyes, inside the jellyfish'sbody, seem specialized for peering [...]

NAME: Paranthropus boisei, a human relative that lived in East Africa from about 2.3 million to 1.2 million years ago. DENTITION: Its massive jaw and flat molars gave rise to [...]

Hummingbirds captured on high-speed video surprised University of Connecticut scientists with the way they drink: a bird dips its tongue in nectar, widens the forked tip and unfurls a fringe [...]

All spiders secrete silk from their abdomens, but it now appears that tarantulas can also shoot silk from their feet. Researchers in Britain turned tarantula glass tanks sideways, shook them [...]

NAME: Pacific salmon (Oncorhynchus). LIFE: Is born in a stream or lake, then swims to and roams the ocean. DEATH: Returns to fresh water to spawn and die. AFTER LIFE: [...]

Paleontologists in Brazil have found the 260-million-year-old skull of a sheep-size therapsid, a distant relative of mammals. They named it Tiarajudens eccentricus. What made it 'eccentric' was it had a [...]

Larvae of the Southeastern beach tiger beetle have an odd way of getting around. Scientists working in Georgia found that, especially on windy days, the larvae hurl themselves into the [...]

Male humpback whales in the South Pacific all sing the same song--until another one catches on and they start singing a new tune. An 11-year study showed that songs usually [...]

Human beings aren't the only animals to yawn when they see another of their kind doing the same. So do dogs and some primates, including chimpanzees. But in a new [...]

A songbird can fly about three times as fast as the silver Y moth (right) over short distances. But during long-distance seasonal migrations, moths travel just as fast as birds, [...]

Fire ants traveled on ships from their native South America to Mobile, Alabama, in the 1930s and spread through the Southeast. Solenopsis invicta has since sprung up in California, the [...]

Spider monkeys have complex behaviors that vary from group to group, according to a comparison of five isolated populations in Central America. In some groups monkeys kiss, in others they [...]

A newly described dinosaur from Utah had a huge hipbone that must have supported massive muscles. Why did Brontomerus ('Thunder Thighs') have such beefy limbs? One possibility, suggested by paleontologists [...]

Fork-tailed drongos in the Kalahari Desert act as sentinels, scanning for predators and producing regular 'all clear' calls so other birds can spend more time looking for food. It's cooperative [...]