William Mullen

When the Shedd Aquarium wants to brew up a batch of sea water for its new, 400,000-gallon shark exhibit, it takes some kind of instant-ocean powder and just adds water,...

Like a detective trying to pick up the trail of a killer by sifting through seemingly innocuous objects left at the scene of the crime, Jennifer McElwain these days is...

Every morning at 5, hours before he shows up to teach science at the Calamus high school, Glenn Drowns is hard at work at his farm, trying to keep a...

Black-capped chickadees, popular back-yard residents with a sweetly familiar "chickadee-dee-dee" call, have been exterminated in huge swaths around Chicago by West Nile virus, according to a report released Tuesday by...

Leaping on a remarkable opportunity to bolster its importance as a major research facility, the Chicago Botanic Garden has purchased one of the world's premier collections of rare botanical books...

Every so often, when Field Museum curators unlock the doors and enter the vast, gloomy backroom storage areas that hold the museum's Native American artifacts, they encounter things that startle...

Schools of fish--large, swirling clouds traveling underwater like flocks of birds--have long been known. An actual school for fish, like the one now in session in the Shedd Aquarium basement,...

State health officials announced Thursday three more human fatalities from West Nile virus but said the volume of new cases is subsiding, likely because of cooler weather. State health officials...

For decades, zookeepers have puzzled over why certain bird species, when paired off in captivity, cannot be encouraged to do what should come naturally. The script has been sadly consistent:...

On a sun-kissed day late last May, crew members on the research vessel Princess Duda swung the arm of the ship's winch over the side and dropped a cable into...