This article was originally featured on Knowable Magazine. Isaac Newton would never have discovered the laws of motion had he studied only cats. Suppose you hold a cat, stomach up, and drop it from a ...

Animals come in an extraordinary range of body shapes. A starfish looks nothing like an earthworm, a mouse, or a human. Yet even closely related species can appear radically different: corals, ...

Inspired by the theories of D’Arcy Thompson, scientists combined theoretical and experimental approaches to establish ‘mechanotypes’ as the physical links between genes and body shapes. Pictured are ...