Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
We tend to picture plastic pollution as something that happens to the ocean: bottles on beaches, a gyre of debris in the Pacific. But some of it is going the other way, into the ground under our…
Shortly after 1 p.m. BST on Sept. 3, the flight control team at ESA's European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt was not watching a spacecraft. It was listening for a signal. More than 200 million…
Somewhere in the middle of a long health survey, a question asks whether you agree that you are talkative. A few pages later, whether you worry a lot. A few pages after that, whether you finish what…
The Hengduan Mountains run north to south along the eastern edge of Tibet, a corrugation of steep ridges and deep river gorges that packs alpine meadow, conifer forest and subtropical valley within a…
Spend the winter at the bottom of a cold pond and there is very little to work with: no food, and water so poor in oxygen that most animals would be in trouble within hours. Frogs manage it for…
Run a physics-based earthquake simulation and what comes back is oddly incomplete. The mechanics are sound (a fault ruptures, waves spread through layered rock, all of it solved from first…
The Chandra X-ray Observatory pointed at one patch of sky more than a hundred separate times, chasing other targets entirely. Stacked together, they come to 6.6 million seconds of observing, a total…
In July and August of 2013, as the snow line climbed uphill on Urumqi Glacier No. 1, a field team climbed up behind it. Five times over those two months they scraped the top centimeter of the surface…
Enderby Land is one of the least-visited coasts on Earth, a long white shoulder of East Antarctica facing the Indian Ocean, with no permanent settlement and barely a weather station. What falls there…
"Hey — how many people are in this chat?" A middle schooler typed that into a chat window at summer camp, and the reply was worth more than the rest of the round: six. Six "people," the bot said, in…
A ribosome spends most of its working life waiting. The machine that builds every protein in every living cell cannot start until a messenger RNA happens to drift into it and thread through the right…
The universe is building stars at well under half the rate it managed 4.5 billion years ago, and the obvious suspect has long been the supply: run a galaxy short of gas and it stops making stars. The…