Researchers are finally beginning to understand what's going on in our guts... and the best ways to soothe them.

How a remote expedition to one of the most isolated places on Earth led to a once-in-a-century sighting

A study in mice reveals that obesity could change how our bodies respond to periods of fasting

Iceland sits upon two continental plates – the Eurasian plate and the North American plate. These huge chunks of Earth’s surface are yawning apart at a pace of 2cm (just shy of 1in) every year. This movement creates fissures in Earth’s surface, like cracks in its shell. In Iceland, the Silfra fissure sits over an aquifer, where glacial meltwater gathers underground, and so this crack became a lake. It's the only body of water in the world that you can dive into and find yourself swimming between two tectonic plates. You can, almost, reach out and touch the Eurasian plate with one hand and the North American plate with the other. I couldn’t tell you why that appeals to me as an idea, as something to see before I die, but it does. While the fissure is around 60m (200ft) deep underwater, in my imagination, swimming through those waters would feel like Earth was opening up beneath me. The idea that there’s another world beneath us has a special kind of hold on humanity, one that’s almost as alluring as the idea that there’s life beyond Earth. The thing is, seismology is now in a place where it’s able to give us a detailed picture of what’s really going on deep inside the planet. And every time it does, our understanding of what it’s like down there changes. In this issue, we share what we've discovered.

A newly discovered caterpillar species has a macabre fashion sense, to say the least

Adults with severe peanut allergies were trained to tolerate handfuls of peanuts in a new study

Machine learning has revealed how US political rhetoric shifted from evidence to emotion over the past 140 years

The ancestors of humans, elephants and giraffes were shaped by hot rocks bubbling up from the Earth's mantle

Bite marks from a Roman skeleton found in England have revealed the first physical evidence that gladiators fought with big cats. The results were not pretty