Articles

Natural Disasters
A Pyroclastic Current That Swallowed Air, and Grew Taller the Farther It Ran
Pick up a fist-sized stone from the ash country east of Naples, and you are holding a thermometer. It is not a precise one, and it stopped working around 40,000 years ago. But the magnetic minerals…
By Olga Schmidt4w ago6 min read
$In a darkened laboratory, a glass cuvette glows along a narrow vertical yellow-green line where an infrared laser passes through a suspension of upconverting nanoparticles, with red, green and blue diffracted copies of the emission spread to either side.$
Science
A Marker That Never Burns out, and a Microscope That Can Say Where One Molecule Sits to 0.6 Angstrom
The whole trick of super-resolution microscopy is a kind of accounting. You cannot see a fluorescent molecule; you can only see the smeared blob of light it throws onto a camera, and that blob is…
By Diana Brinker4w ago5 min read
Space
Several Satellite Constellations Already Exceed the Size at Which Their Debris Turns Unstable, or Runs Away
Ask a national regulator whether a satellite is safe to launch and you will get an answer about that satellite. Will it come down within the required window? Can it be steered out of somebody else's…
By Victor Kuklin4w ago5 min read
Environment
Fire and Fertilizer Push Alaskan Tundra the Same Way, at Different Speeds
Tussock tundra looks, from the air, like a lumpy green carpet. Up close it is something more particular: a dense mat of mosses and lichens with sedge tussocks rising out of it, a community that…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago5 min read
Environment
Better Forecasts, or Better-Value Ones? What Happens When You Put a Price on an AI Weather Model
A drainage crew has until Thursday evening to decide: put the flood barriers out, or leave them in the depot. The forecast offers a probability of heavy rain, not a promise of it. Deploying costs a…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read
Environment
US Mainland Honey Was as Clean as Certified Organic Imports; 30% of Hawaii's Certified Organic Honey Was Not
Pick up a jar labeled USDA organic honey in an American supermarket and the label is almost certainly describing a farm somewhere else. Brazil, Argentina, or one of a handful of apiaries in Hawaii.…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago3 min read
Space
An Honest Map of Mars's Buried Ice, Including the Places Where the Answer Is 'We Don't Know'
Every so often a meteorite punches through the dust of the Martian midlatitudes and leaves something startling behind: a splash of bright white ice at the bottom of a fresh crater, visible from orbit…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay4w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
A Humanoid Dodged 95% of Thrown Balls Using Its Own Head Camera, Outperforming Tidier Safety Maths
A ball comes in at a humanoid robot standing in a Caltech lab. It has no motion-capture rig watching the room, no external tracker, no operator feeding it coordinates. All it has is a camera on its…
By Diana Brinker4w ago5 min read
Environment
The Diet Target That Cuts Emissions in Rich Cities and Raises Them in Poor Ones
There is a number in this study that is true of the world and true of almost no city in it. Ask a global food model what would happen if every urban population on Earth switched to the reference diet…
By Anna Kotlyar4w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
The Slowest Part of a Quantum Computer May Be the Ordinary Software Reading Its Errors
Every quantum computer that corrects its own errors is running a race against itself. The hardware measures its qubits over and over, thousands of times a second, and each round produces a small…
By Wilkens Etienne4w ago5 min read
Environment
Nowhere Left to Climb: A Volcano's Beetles Run out of Mountain
Climb Volcán Cacao in northwestern Costa Rica and the forest changes under your feet. At the bottom is seasonally dry lowland forest that bakes. About 1,500 vertical meters higher, at the top, is…
By Andreja Jezernik4w ago5 min read
Environment
The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out
Qikiqtaruk is a small, treeless island off the Yukon coast, and every summer it gets smaller. Waves undercut its ice-rich bluffs, thawed ground slumps, and slabs of Pleistocene permafrost drop into…
By Oli Kotyk4w ago5 min read

Browse by topic

By format

About

Articles

A Pyroclastic Current That Swallowed Air, and Grew Taller the Farther It Ran

A Marker That Never Burns out, and a Microscope That Can Say Where One Molecule Sits to 0.6 Angstrom

Several Satellite Constellations Already Exceed the Size at Which Their Debris Turns Unstable, or Runs Away

Fire and Fertilizer Push Alaskan Tundra the Same Way, at Different Speeds

Better Forecasts, or Better-Value Ones? What Happens When You Put a Price on an AI Weather Model

US Mainland Honey Was as Clean as Certified Organic Imports; 30% of Hawaii's Certified Organic Honey Was Not

An Honest Map of Mars's Buried Ice, Including the Places Where the Answer Is 'We Don't Know'

A Humanoid Dodged 95% of Thrown Balls Using Its Own Head Camera, Outperforming Tidier Safety Maths

The Diet Target That Cuts Emissions in Rich Cities and Raises Them in Poor Ones

The Slowest Part of a Quantum Computer May Be the Ordinary Software Reading Its Errors

Nowhere Left to Climb: A Volcano's Beetles Run out of Mountain

The Seafloor Vault: Once Permafrost Carbon Settles Into Arctic Nearshore Mud, Less Than a Tenth of It Is Breathed Back Out