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For as long as anyone had bothered to record it, Hayli Gubbi did nothing. It sat at the southern end of the Erta Ale volcanic range in the Afar depression, a low basaltic shield with no eruption in…
Walk any tide line today and you will find the arrangement everywhere: a hermit crab in a borrowed shell, worms and sponges crusting the inside of an abandoned whelk, a whole small economy built…
A volcano is never truly silent. Even when nothing erupts, the ground beneath a place like Askja hums with a faint, ceaseless vibration: ocean waves pounding a distant coast, wind dragging over rock,…
A soil-protection law is easy to pass and hard to grade. A parliament can require crop rotation, subsidize farmers who leave wildflower strips at the edges of their fields, or mandate ground cover to…
Farmers know the feeling before they can name it. A field that once filled the bins now comes up a little short, and then a little shorter, and the reason is not the weather this season or the seed.…
Picture an ant trying to walk a trail while a herd of elephants stampedes down the same path. That is roughly the problem Prem Kumar and his group at Northwestern set themselves, and the ant,…
Ask how often a river floods catastrophically and the standard answer comes wrapped in a number: the 100-year flood, an event so severe it strikes, on average, once a century. It is the figure…
A bobolink that summers in a North American hayfield winters in the grasslands of Argentina, a round trip of roughly 12,000 miles. A spoon-billed sandpiper hatched on the Arctic coast of Russia will…
The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…
Ask a person to drive from a friend's house to a restaurant they've never visited, in a city they know only in patches, and something quietly remarkable happens. They don't consult a lookup table of…
Ask a chatbot for a proof and you brace for a confident, wrong answer. So there is a certain irony in what a team of four researchers reported this week: they asked a language model to help with a…
By the end of 29 October 2024, a rain gauge in the small town of Turís, inland from Valencia, had recorded something almost no one in Europe had seen: 771 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours.…