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Averages are reassuring, and that is exactly the problem. When people talk about rain getting heavier in a warming world, the mental image is usually a whole distribution nudging up a notch:…
Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…
Nothing in the apparatus actually spins. That is the first surprise, and the one that makes the rest of the story hang together. Sitting on a bench at the City University of New York's Advanced…
The land that is best for growing crops turns out to be attractive for another reason: it is flat, open, cleared, close to roads and power lines, and often bathed in the strong sunshine that also…
A comet is, in the most literal sense, a piece of frozen memory. The ice that makes up its body records the temperature, the chemistry, and the company it kept when it first congealed out of a cloud…
For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for ordinary matter to exist. Protons and neutrons had not formed; instead, their constituents, quarks and gluons,…
Over roughly 34 hours in July 2019, the desert northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California, tore open twice. A magnitude 6.4 shock struck on the Fourth of July; the next evening a magnitude 7.1…
A volcano rarely gives you six days' notice. Ruang, a 725-metre cone rising straight out of the sea in North Sulawesi, gave Indonesia's monitors almost exactly that in April 2024. This time, the…
Anyone who has tried to answer a serious biomedical question knows the problem is rarely a shortage of information. It is that the information sits in too many places at once: one database for genes,…
Every clock is, at heart, a thing that ticks at a rate you can count on. A pendulum swings; a quartz crystal vibrates; in the best atomic clocks, electrons jump between two energy levels exactly so…
Somewhere in the galaxy, particles get flung to energies that dwarf anything a human-built collider can reach. Astronomers call the engines behind them PeVatrons, sources able to accelerate cosmic…
The usual story about antibiotic resistance ends with a plea for new drugs, and the pipeline for those is famously thin. A study out of two American labs points at a different move: not inventing a…