BEFORE THERE WERE SATELLITES, THERE WERE SUBMERSIBLES, and before that, sextants, and before that, sticks. The Marshall Islands consist of 29 atolls, scattered over 180,000 nautical miles in the Northern Pacific. The Southeast Asians who settled there in the...

    IT USED TO BE ASSUMED THAT DIRECT SUNLIGHT WAS NECESSARY to sustain all major forms of life on Earth. That was until 7-foot tube worms, giant white clams, eyeless shrimp, and many other creatures were discovered to be thriving in complete darkness nearly a mile...

    IT HAS CRUISED THE WORLD'S OCEANS FOR 42 YEARS—more than a million nautical miles from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific and from the Arctic to the Black Sea—and now is nearing retirement. But the R/V Endeavor is still hard at work about 200 days each year,...

HUMANS HAVE RELIED ON A VARIETY OF NATURAL COMPOUNDS from plants, fungi, and other organisms for their medicinal properties for many thousands of years. The search for new medicines to treat diseases has long relied on these natural products, so much so that...

    THE WORD "LAB" may suggest white coats, microscopes, and petri dishes. But for Jon Witman and the members of his lab at Brown University, the word has a completely different—and wetter—connotation. The group of 10 spends much of their time together as a lab in the...