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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
On July 23, Dev Kumar Thapa and Anshu Pandey made an extraordinary claim online. It wasn’t your garden variety fake news: By cramming microscopic particles of gold and silver together into pellets, they said, they’d constructed the first ever room-temperature superconductor. In a 13-page PDF, the two chemists at the Indian Institute of Science laid […]
Few things are as good for an island as bird droppings. Guano is full of essential nitrogen—the stuff in fertilizer that helps plants grow—and flying flocks provide a robust supply. And few things are as bad for an island as invasive rats, which show up and devour everything in their path—including the eggs and chicks […]
When smoke from California’s wildfires was smothering the Bay Area last month, the Oakland Zoo closed to the public. The staff worked in shifts, many of them wearing N95 face masks, monitoring how animals dealt with the smoke from the fires more than a hundred miles away. Southern California was also dealing with wildfires and […]
To anyone reading this on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop (so, you know, basically all of you): We need to talk about how we talk about screen use. For too long the conversation’s been stuck on how much time we spend on our devices, and the effect that time has on our well-being. The […]
Given the choice between tossing back a dose of medicine and pushing it through your flesh inside a cold, steel needle, most people pick the pill. Convenience, portability, and lack of skin-stabbiness have made pills the most popular way to administer drugs for the better part of medical history. But not all drugs can survive […]
You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The […]
Q: What does it mean to be a super blood wolf moon? A: Like presidential elections and celebrity drama, the beauty and intrigue of lunar events lies in their regularity. Supermoon! Blood moon! Harvest moon! Wolf harvest sturgeon blue blood pink worm supermoon! Alright, maybe that last one isn’t a thing (a pink moon being […]