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Not whether the planet is warming, but whether the warming itself has sped up: that narrower question has had two confident and opposite answers in the space of two years, from different teams…
The sample was beach sand, and whoever opened the package had no way of knowing what was in it. Someone else knew exactly. A counted set of plastic particles had been mixed into the sand before it…
In 1958 a zoologist at Cambridge put dace, trout and goldfish through an apparatus built to record a fish swimming continuously, and counted tail beats. Richard Bainbridge came away with a line tidy…
A conversation with an AI model ends, and the screen asks for something more than an opinion. It asks for a signature on a real petition, or for money to go to a charity. A study published Oct. 16,…
A geologist arriving at Mount Shamao finds almost nothing to look at. The hill is about a kilometer across, at the northern edge of greater Taipei, and subtropical rain, forest and housing have left…
An Andean condor and a trumpeter swan are about as heavy as flying animals get, and they are almost exactly as heavy as each other: roughly 11 kilograms apiece. By the rules printed in textbooks,…
A massive star serves the universe in two ways, and they arrive in order. While it lives, it floods its surroundings with ultraviolet light energetic enough to tear the electron off a hydrogen atom.…
Dr. Stephen Volz helped build America's satellite infrastructure. In a conversation with ALLATRA, he explains what the data is telling us about our planet and our future. When you check the weather…
A robotic gripper closes on a pencil lead half a millimeter thick and does not snap it. The same hand meets something sharp and pulls back. Neither trick turns mainly on how sensitive a single touch…
The quickest way to learn where a volcano's lava came from is to walk up to it with a bucket of water. Geologists at the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory did that in the middle of September 2026, at…
Stand in a dry field on a windy afternoon and it is easy to assume the wind is stealing water from the plants around you. For a single leaf, that has been known to be wrong for about a decade. In…
There are two ways for a fish to end up among the smallest vertebrates on Earth. One is to shrink in proportion. The result is a tiny animal otherwise built like its larger relatives, with everything…