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The busiest day of the Atlantic hurricane season, by the long-run average, is September 10. That day came and went with no hurricane anywhere in the basin, and so did the day after it. When September…
A picosecond is a trillionth of a second. Light itself crosses only about a third of a millimeter in one. Inside the carbon-based solids chemists want to use to make hydrogen from sunlight, that is…
In a computer, the collision that made the Moon has always been a collision between two liquids. It is not that anyone thought the young Earth and the body that struck it were molten all the way…
On Feb. 9, 2023, astronomers pointed an infrared spectrograph at a comet and measured the temperature of the water gas pouring off it. The warmest water was not at the comet. It was a little way out,…
On the north side of Alaska's Brooks Range, spruce are moving into ground that used to be tundra. Observations show the treeline there advancing quickly, and the warming behind it is not in doubt.…
Lanthanum hydride is not a material you can hold in your hand. To make it, you squeeze a speck of lanthanum and hydrogen between the polished tips of two diamonds until the pressure passes a million…
Ask one large language model to design a crystal and you are asking it to do two jobs at once. The first is chemistry: what will hold together, what is likely to be stable, what has already been…
A white dwarf is a star that has run out of fuel and collapsed to about the size of Earth, and its gravity is brutal. Anything heavier than helium sinks out of the atmosphere and vanishes from view.…
Every large language model is trained on a finite pile of text, and the pile is running low. When the fresh human writing runs out, the cheapest thing left to do is show the model text it has already…
A medieval grave with plague DNA in it is easy to date and hard to place. Radiocarbon will usually say the person died somewhere inside a window of a century or more, which is precise enough for…
Every week through the growing season, for 20 years, researchers have walked into the Lötschental, a valley in the Swiss Alps. There they cut a pencil-thin plug of wood out of the same trees. Each…
Switzerland puts a great deal of engineering between its households and its lakes. Wastewater runs through a treatment plant before it reaches a river, and the country knows roughly what comes out…