Gabriel Popkin

A centuries-old concept in soil science has recently been thrown out. Yet it remains a key ingredient in everything from climate models to advanced carbon-capture projects.

The physicist Jeff Gore tests theories about microbe communities experimentally and finds new rules governing ecological stability.

In the “underground economy” for soil nutrients, fungi strike hard bargains and punish plants that won’t meet their price.

New work at the intersection of atmospheric science and ecology is finding that forests can influence rainfall and climate from across a continent.

Atomic clocks are letting physicists tighten the lasso around elusive phenomena such as dark matter.

With electrical signals, simple cells organize themselves into complex societies and negotiate with other colonies.

The new experiments suggest that simple models can explain the behavior of thousands of interacting organisms.

The subtle mechanics of densely packed cells may help explain why some cancerous tumors stay put while others break off and spread through the body.

Complex natural systems defy analysis using a standard mathematical toolkit, so one ecologist is throwing out the equations.