Travel notes, shell guides, and local life from the Andaman coast. Profiles of our artisans and the rhythm of beach life, refreshed with the bay every morning.
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Beneath an olive grove in southern Italy, ground-penetrating radar and gentle electric currents have found signs of unexplored chambers beside the cave that guards two 20,000-year-old bone figurines — and no one had to dig to find them.
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A bronze signet ring engraved with the Lighthouse of Alexandria — the first of its kind ever found — has been recovered from the sunken royal palace island of Antirhodos, and it was found in the very offices that once administered the ancient Wonder.
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Half a kilometre down off Costa Rica, metre-tall yellow coral trees rise from seafloors carpeted with brittle stars — so distinct that science had to invent a new family, Laurinqueidae, and name it in Tolkien's Elvish.
A two-week taxonomy workshop in Buenos Aires has confirmed 57 new marine species — including Loki, a horned sea cucumber named for the Norse trickster god — from a South Atlantic canyon twice as deep as the Grand Canyon.
A century-old museum sponge just gave up its secret: ten new species of one-headed, tree-bodied branching worms — and an entirely new genus — revealed by DNA from specimens that waited in drawers since 1914.
The fish behind the world's sea-serpent legends has been hiding a mechanical marvel in its fin: hundreds of independently rotating, ball-and-socket fin rays that work like tiny joysticks. A Cornell team just described it for the first time.
Two new sea spider species — one with hairy feet and red eyes, one named for the sound of crashing waves — have just been described from the Salish Sea, the first new sea spiders formally named there in almost a century.
Archaeologists clearing debris to protect old tombs from flash floods near Luxor stumbled upon a forgotten 3,000-year-old tomb — its vivid paintings of an official named Paser, his wife, and an offering table of bread, beer and flowers survived untouched under a layer of dust.
For the first time ever, a giant ten-sided atmospheric wave has appeared around Saturn's south pole — noticed first by two amateur astronomers and confirmed by the Hubble Space Telescope. Everyone watching now is among the first humans to see a planet-sized pattern being born.
For two and a half years, a glowing golden dome found 3,250 metres down in the Gulf of Alaska puzzled NOAA's scientists. The answer, finally revealed, is lovelier than every guess: it was the golden anchor a giant deep-sea anemone left behind.
For centuries Europe treasured narwhal tusks as unicorn horns. Now six of these "sea unicorns," fitted with satellite sensors, have mapped the deepest winters of the world's largest fjord system — logging 2,060 dives and collecting data ships can never reach.
Two divers off Mazara del Vallo, Sicily, have rediscovered a Roman merchant ship sealed for twenty centuries — with roughly 500 wine amphorae, lead anchors, and a story of Mediterranean trade waiting to be read.
Stonehenge is doing something unexpectedly intimate this August: one advance booking each day will be chosen for private time inside the stone circle before regular visitors arrive. Here’s why that rare moment feels so magical—and how the practical details work.
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