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A genome sequence can end a family's search for an answer, and it can also hand them a list. Among the millions of spelling differences that make one person's DNA unlike anyone else's, a clinical…
In May 2023, astronomers pointed the Very Large Array at a galaxy whose black hole had just begun doing something it had never been seen to do. Every radio look at 1ES 1927+654 before that year had…
A coral is not a tree, but it keeps the same kind of books. The slow-growing stony corals of the northern Gulf of Mexico add a layer of limestone every year, one on top of the last, for centuries.…
Freeze a bucket of seawater and the salt does not freeze with it. Ice crystals grow out of nearly pure water and shove everything dissolved (salt, minerals, whatever organic molecules happen to be…
Every new AI model arrives with a table of scores. The table travels into procurement decisions, into news coverage and into draft regulation, where it is read as a description of the product. It…
You took a few thousand steps today, and almost every one of them started the same way. The back of the heel touched down first, slightly ahead of the rest of the foot, and the load rolled forward…
Suppose the world one day takes more carbon dioxide out of the air than it puts in. Emissions fall to zero, then go past it. The air thins, the planet stops warming and slowly starts to cool. What do…
Before anyone could say that a robotaxi crashes less often than you do, somebody had to sit down and read 736 crash reports. Not the tables, the narratives: a few lines of prose describing what hit…
In maternity wards in New Orleans, Omaha, the Twin Cities and New York City, women who had just given birth were handed a debit card and told it would be topped up on the same day every month until…
For billions of years, the natural world has acted as a silent engineer. It methodically discarded ineffective solutions and refined the good ones. As a result, these mechanisms became so effective…
The map of what America grows has been sliding north. As the climate has warmed, corn and soybean have pushed farther toward the Dakotas, and the good years have moved with them. A paper published…
A fast radio burst lasts about a thousandth of a second, and then it is gone. What survives the trip is a smear: the burst's low frequencies arrive slightly behind its high ones, delayed in…