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Finally! Climate Science Returns to Capitol Hill

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Climate science made a big comeback on Capitol Hill yesterday, with two separate hearings underway on the same day that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2018 the fourth-hottest year on record and revealed that climate-related weather events caused $91 billion in damages to the US economy. The last time that climate change was […]

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An Adorable Rodent Gives a Glimpse Into Earth’s Climate Chaos

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Bounding around on giant hind limbs, using its giant tail to balance, the well-named giant kangaroo rat of Southern California is half Pokemon, half Mighty Mouse. It emerges at night to forage on seeds, building up underground stores. When it’s not busy foraging, it’s busy scrapping with its peers to claim territory. It dominates these […]

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Cosmology Is in Crisis Over How to Measure the Universe

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Let’s say you have a baby. Maybe you really do, maybe you don’t. But Dan Scolnic, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, does have one, and perhaps that's why a hypothetical baby helps him explain the universe. If you take this baby to the doctor, that doctor will weigh and measure the baby, plot […]

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Here's a Way to Fight Climate Change: Empower Women

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“Gender and climate are inextricably linked,” said environmentalist and author Katharine Wilkinson on stage at TEDWomen last week, a gathering of women thought leaders and activists in Palm Desert, California. Women, she says, are disproportionately affected by climate change. When communities are decimated by floods or droughts, tsunamis or fire, the most vulnerable among them […]

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Water, Flour, Syrup, Dye: Mastering the Elements of Fake Blood

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The internet is oozing (dripping? spurting?) with recipes for fake blood, but to get the exact color and consistency your Halloween costume calls for—be it bright and wet or dark and crusty—your best bet is to brew your own bloody concoction. To do it, it helps to know the properties of blood that you're approximating […]

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The Side Effects of Solar Geoengineering Could Be Minimal

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It sounds like a drastic course of action: inject stuff high into Earth’s atmosphere to reflect a little sunlight and help counteract global warming. Then again, injecting a bunch of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and warming the planet was pretty drastic, too. The key to thinking sensibly about this “solar geoengineering” is to avoid […]

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Wisconsin's Floods Are Catastrophic—and Only Getting Worse

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. An entire summer’s worth of rain has fallen across a broad swath of the Midwest in recent days. The resulting record floods have wrecked homes and altered the paths of rivers, in one case destroying a waterfall in Minnesota. The worst-affected […]

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Dive Under the Ice With the Brave Robots of Antarctica

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The lava fields of Hawaii. The peaks of the Himalayas. The crowds of a Justin Bieber concert. These are among the most perilous of environments on planet Earth, places where few humans dare tread. They ain’t got nothin’, though, on waters of our planet’s polar regions, where frigid temperatures and considerable pressures would snuff a […]

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Touchdown on Mars! NASA Lands Its InSight Spacecraft

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After a six-month journey across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, NASA's InSight spacecraft—a mission nearly ten years and close to $1 billion in the making—landed successfully on the surface of Mars on Monday, touching down on the planet's surface just a few minutes before 12:00 pm PT. In the final moments of […]