The custos of the Holy Land, Father Francesco Patton, lights the first candle of the Advent wreath at the site of the manger inside the Nativity Grotto on Nov. 30, 2024, during the first vespers of ...

Around the world, trail designers are quietly employing surprising techniques to engineer awe. You’ve probably felt it without even knowing why. Inside the creative science that’s transforming your ...

One of the pits of the olive trees, whose grape seeds and pollen caught in centuries of rock have already begun to draw a strange picture in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre: not tomb and rock alone, ...

What will a few carbon-dark grains of seed in a stone floor tell us of a place to which millions of people have paid a tribute of reverence? The sensory world is right there in Jerusalem, in the ...

The importance of what lies beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is that the structure is not merely a shrine; it is also a functioning structure being pushed to its limits, obliged to continue ...

Dominica fully lives up to its self-appointed nickname as the "Caribbean’s Nature Island." In a region that brims with pristine beaches requiring nothing more but to show up and relax, Dominica ...

Decades ago, India’s tigers were on the brink of extinction. Slowly, their numbers have rebounded. But that ecological success has prompted a dire problem—and a race to save many of them from genetic ...

In all the papal basilicas, the official document of closing the Holy Door has been deposited along with the key to the door and several pontifical medals from the last sealing. The pope closed the ...

These 10 standout images were among thousands of stunning submissions in National Geographic’s Your Shot Pictures of the Year 2025 challenge. The delicate West Indian seagrape sawfly (Sericoceros ...

Gum makers have claimed, for decades, chewing is good for your mental health. They’re kind of on to something. Humans have chewed on gum for millennia. Scientists are still trying to figure out why.

A natural experiment in a national park in Patagonia shows how the return of a large predator can reshape an ecosystem. Long absent from Argentinian Patagonia due to over-hunting, pumas have returned ...

Although traditionally a jubilee only happens every 25 years, the Holy Door is slated to reopen for a special 2033 Jubilee when the Church will celebrate the Holy Year of the Redemption. The Edicule ...