It's early autumn in central China, and the streets of Ding Qingzi's village are turning into gold. Thousands of husked corncobs lie in orderly rectangles in front of homes, their kernels drying in the sun. The harvest is one of the heartbeats of rural life in Anhui Province, a constant that Ding, 35, has known since childhood. Yet few other rhythms remain. Except for the corn, the streets are almost empty. The sounds of children have faded. And for years, Ding struggled to find a wife. Few young women still live in the village. Fewer still would marry a welder unable to buy a house or pay a bride-price. "My family is not rich," Ding says.

Many animals like to play, often for no other apparent reason than enjoyment. Pet owners know this is true for cats, dogs, even rodents--and scientists have observed the same in some fish, frogs, lizards, and birds. Are their minds and lives rich enough to make room for play? New research published in the journal Animal Behaviour suggests that bumblebees seem to enjoy rolling around wooden balls, without being trained or receiving rewards--presumably just because it's fun. "It shows that bees are not little robots that just respond to stimuli… and they do carry out activities that might be pleasurable," says lead author Samadi Galpayage, a researcher at the Queen Mary University of London.

Reuben Wu, a British photographer and visual artist based in Chicago, was first introduced to National Geographic as most people are: When he was a child, he enjoyed looking at the magazines his father subscribed to for decades. He dreamed of seeing his photographs in the same magazine--and even on the cover. So when National Geographic asked him to photograph an iconic monument he knows well, he was ready to work. Last summer, Wu experienced a stark contrast of modern and prehistoric, as he used drones and artificial light to photograph Stonehenge, one of the best-known prehistoric monuments, while hearing honking cars passing by. The site in Wiltshire, England, is bisected by the A303--a major road that may soon be in a tunnel should a 2020 proposal become reality--which means motorists may have seen Wu's photo shoot and lit-up drones.

Each summer, thousands of people flock to the surf beaches of California and Australia, eager to catch one of the Pacific's classic waves. But they likely don't realize that they're sharing the water with growing numbers of great white sharks congregating offshore. The phenomenon has been confirmed using drone technology, which is transforming shark research with its ability to give scientists a bird's-eye view of the animals inhabiting the world's coasts. Drone observations often can reveal more than Earth-bound research methods about shark movements, feeding habits, social relationships, and the animals' reactions to people in their habitat.

There's nothing more romantic than a hunt for hidden treasure--and when those riches are located in the watery depths of the ocean, it can seem even more exciting. Shipwrecks spark the imagination, prompting dreams of untold riches and swashbuckling adventure. More vessels lie at the bottom of the sea than you might think; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's database lists over 10,000 known wrecks off of United States shores alone--and that's not a complete list. According to United Nations cultural agency UNESCO, there are at least 3 million such wrecks worldwide, some thousands of years old. And then there's the booty some of those ships carried. Though there's an argument to be made that the treasure aboard now-sunken vessels is priceless, some experts estimate as much as $60 billion in precious metals lies on the ocean floor.

Every dog owner knows that saying Good dog! in a happy, high-pitched voice will evoke a flurry of joyful tail wagging in their pet. That made scientists curious: What exactly happens in your dog's brain when it hears praise, and is it similar to the hierarchical way our own brain processes such acoustic information? When a person gets a compliment, the more primitive, subcortical auditory regions first reacts to the intonation--the emotional force of spoken words. Next, the brain taps the more recently evolved auditory cortex to figure out the meaning of the words, which is learned. In 2016, a team of scientists discovered that dogs' brains, like those of humans, compute the intonation and meaning of a word separately--although dogs use their right brain hemisphere to do so, whereas we use our left hemisphere.

On a summer Monday evening in 1833, Ada Byron and her mother Anne Isabella "Annabella" Byron went to the home of English mathematician Charles Babbage. Twelve days earlier, when the younger Byron met Babbage at a high society soiree, she had been taken with his description of a machine he was building. The hand-cranked apparatus of bronze and steel used stacks of cogs, hammer-like metal arms, and thousands of numbered wheels to automatically solve mathematical equations. But the Difference Engine, as Babbage called it, was incomplete. He had finished a small prototype that stood about two-and-a-half feet tall.

Take a walk in French Guiana's tropical rainforests, and you'll encounter giant spiderwebs longer than a school bus. Inside, thousands of tiny, quarter-inch-long spiders wait for their prey to be trapped, allowing the predators to rush to overwhelm their victims. "In groups, they can capture prey up to 700 times [heavier] than each individual spider," such as moths and grasshoppers, says Raphaël Jeanson, an ethologist who studies the behavior of animals in their natural environment at the Center for Integrative Biology in Toulouse, France. Anelosimus eximius is a so-called "social" spider that lives in large, cooperative colonies--an extremely rare lifestyle for spiders. Each amber-colored South American spider is smaller than a ladybug, and even when they're hunting together, they pose no threat to people.

Whale sharks can carry up to 300 babies at once--at different fetal stages and from different fathers. Zebra sharks experience "virgin birth." These are but a mere sampling of the decade's most fascinating shark discoveries. Some 500 known species of these toothy fish ply our planet's waters, ranging from bite size to bus size, and scientists are still becoming acquainted with most of them. Since 2000, when scientists discovered shark populations were collapsing around the world, research on sharks has ramped up across many fields of study, from paleontology to neuroscience to biomechanics.

On a raw December day, as Christmas music blares over loudspeakers, an African elephant named Asha walks in tight circles in an enclosure at Natural Bridge Zoo, a roadside attraction in Virginia. Her living quarters consist of a barn and three outdoor yards--a fenced patch of grass about 90 by 40 feet, a dirt patch with a few logs scattered about, and a yard where she gives rides to children for $15 and her massive feet have worn a ring into the grass. Her space is barren--no shrubs, trees, or watering holes. Elephants, like humans, are social animals. In the wild, females typically live in herds of eight or more, yet Asha, who's nearly 40 years old, has been confined mostly alone for more than 30 years.