Stories by Emily Schwing

Volcano detectives use artificial intelligence to sleuth out ancient secrets in Alaska. 

The Arctic Permafrost Atlas, which took years to create, is both beautiful and sobering, given the pace of climate change.

If you’re a silphid beetle, a dead body is all your children really want, and it’s your job—no matter how difficult—to get one for them.

Sea ice is changing fast. Are forecasts created by artificial intelligence the best way to keep up with the pace of a warming climate in the far north?

A massive storm slammed into Alaska’s western coast, and there was no ice to stop it.

A new study links sea ice decline with increasing wildfire weather in the Western U.S.

New fossils are changing a decades-old story about the species that roamed the Mediterranean 80 million years ago.

Equally surprising is the fact that we still do not know how birds actually stay airborne.

Wildfires, appearing dead in winter, are actually smoldering and then bouncing back to life in spring to consume increasingly more land in the Far North.

A 15-year study of where carbon lies in boreal forests has unearthed a surprising finding.

Over millions of years of evolution, some beetles have learned to dampen the stench of decay to help their young thrive.

Here’s what we can learn about climate change and infrastructure from Denali National Park’s only road.

One mathematician has spend decades uncovering the deadly calculations of pestilence and plague, sometimes finding data that were hiding in plain sight.

It is like when your cell phone keeps you awake in bed—except mosquitoes do not doom scroll when they stay up, they feast on your blood.

The disappearance of their predators in a disturbed ecosystem has turned Atlantic forest sloths from night creatures to day adventurers.

Researchers seeking evidence for cancer in dinosaurs found it in a collection of bones at a paleontology museum in Alberta.

The finding of a baby dinosaur fossil in the Arctic implies that some dinos nested in the region, which was milder than today but not toasty.

Rather than undergoing active chameleonlike color changes, glass frogs’ translucency allows light to bounce from their background and go through them—making their apparent color close to their setting.  

Now submerged caves in the Yucatán Peninsula contain remains of ocher-mining operations that date back at least 10,000 years.

The sword-tailed cricket can discern bats’ echolocation signals by only responding to calls of a certain volume—at which point it plummets out of their approach.

The Silent Cities project is collecting sound from cities around the planet during the coronavirus pandemic to give researchers a database of natural sound in areas usually filled with human-generated noise.

The geese are wintering farther and farther north, in urban areas like Chicago—which may help them avoid hunters. Emily Schwing reports.

New beaver ponds in the Arctic may contribute to the destruction of the permafrost that holds that landscape together.

A social scientist studies how car stickers turn the roads into actual information highways.