Wonder Science spoke with Richard Prum about the mechanisms underlying feather patterning on the Argus Pheasant. Prum is the William Robertson Coe Professor of Ornithology at Yale University, and Curator of Ornithology and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Richard Prum: The identity of a cell at aRead More

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, orbiting our host star at an average distance of one astronomical unit (AU), or about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the center of the star. Unlike the other rocky planets of the inner solar system (Mercury, Venus, and Mars), Earth is mostly covered in liquidRead More

  Since our earliest ancestors gazed up from dimming campfires to marvel at the night sky, the stars have been a source of awe and wonder for humankind. After thousands of years of tracking, mapping, and cataloging those mysterious points of light, twentieth century conflict brought with it an unexpected means of reaching them.  Read More

  A Mysterious State of Matter Powers Our Digital Displays   The three states of matter to which every foundational chemistry class introduces us — solid, liquid, and gas — turn out not to be quite so clearly delineated as they might seem. Liquid crystals represent a sort of mixed state, not quite solid butRead More

The Molecular Structure That Causes Enthralling Light Effects in Soap Bubbles —      Soap bubbles, peacock feathers, and CDs all have one notable feature in common: all three are iridescent, they appear to change color when viewed from different angles. In the case of soap bubbles, this quality stems from the structure of aRead More

  If it can be produced on a large scale, graphene might be the backbone of the next revolution in electronics, building materials, medical devices, and much more. First isolated in 2004 by Professor Sir Andre Geim and Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov of the University of Manchester, graphene is one of the first two-dimensional materials discovered, composed of aRead More

  In Sandro Botticelli’s iconic painting, “The Birth of Venus,” the goddess of beauty is depicted standing inside a giant scallop shell. In nature, inside its radiating ridged shell, the scallop resembles an undifferentiated round blob. But the beloved bivalve mollusk is not as simple as meets the eye. The scallop possesses an unusual formRead More

The Lepidoptera are beloved among insects. Most of us are familiar with their fluttering beauty, seasonal migrations, and amazing ability to transform from caterpillars. But here are some surprising facts about butterflies which you may not have heard: 1. Butterfly metamorphosis is grisly. To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests its own body insideRead More

Cyanobacteria originated pivotal evolutionary developments which transformed our planet. These microscopic bacteria live alone or in colonies, in any environment that has moisture. Over 2 billion years ago, cyanobacteria triggered the Great Oxygenation Event. Every breath we take, we owe to cyanobacteria. It is thanks to them that complex life forms evolved in the firstRead More

  If you’ve ever caught a snowflake on your tongue, you’ve likely swallowed a bacterium called Pseudomonas syringae. Don’t worry, it’s harmless. The rod-shaped, Gram-negative bacteria can be found in the exact center of trillions of snowflakes. Its presence there is directly tied to the formation of the snowflakes themselves. Snowflakes don’t just materialize outRead More

    A snowflake is made up of billions of water molecules, each one identical to every other. And yet somehow in a snowflake a single ingredient is able to form endlessly varying, intricate, and symmetrical designs. How do water molecules do it? The surprising truth is that in order to freeze, water molecules assumeRead More