Articles

Space
The Moon's Radius Has Fallen 42 to 46 Meters, Counted One Fault at a Time
Look closely at the Moon's highlands in a high-resolution photograph and the ground is not as dead as it looks. Thousands of low cliffs run across it, some only a few meters high, each one a thrust…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay2 days ago5 min read
Environment
Spring Heat Is Rising Faster Than the Climate Models Say
A stretch of unseasonably warm days in April rarely gets a name. It does not close schools or lead the evening news the way a July heatwave does, and climate research has mostly treated it the same…
By Anna Kotlyar2 days ago3 min read
AI & Technology
Moving to a New Phone Left the Transfer Open to an Eavesdropper Nearby
The half hour at the phone shop counter is the dullest part of buying a new phone, and the most revealing. The old handset and the new one sit side by side while a progress bar crawls, and almost…
By Wilkens Etienne2 days ago5 min read
Environment
Water Makes Everyday Plastics Chemically Active at Their Surface
A flask of orange dye, a spoonful of plastic powder, water, and a stirrer turning in the dark. After 10 days the orange was nearly gone. Nothing in that flask was supposed to be able to do that: the…
By Gabriela Szalayová2 days ago5 min read
Natural Disasters
Myanmar's Fault Twists With Depth, and Older Satellite Data Already Said So
Seismologists have one answer they cannot give, and they give it constantly: nobody knows when a fault will break. So a team working across Munich, San Diego, Zurich and Yangon asked a narrower…
By Anna Werner2 days ago6 min read
$A wide near-infrared view of a star-forming cloud, with glowing orange, green and blue filaments of gas and dust, dark dust lanes, and many bright stars showing eight-pointed diffraction spikes.$
Space
A Second Young Star Appears to Be in the Phase That Dates Our Solar System's Oldest Rocks
Almost everything anyone knows about when the Solar System began rests on a few pale specks inside meteorites. They are calcium-aluminum-rich inclusions, grains condensed from hot gas close to the…
By Victor Kuklin3 days ago5 min read
Environment
On Hot Days, Delivery Emissions Grow Faster Than Delivery Orders
The hottest hour of a summer day in a Chinese city tends to arrive around lunchtime, which is also the hour when several million people decide what to eat. For a growing number of them the answer is…
By Andreja Jezernik3 days ago3 min read
Science
A Machine-Built Lower-Mantle Catalog, and a Mismatch Its Authors Cannot yet Explain
Somewhere on a seismogram the flat line starts to wobble. Deciding exactly where that wobble begins is the measurement: it fixes the moment a wave that set out from an earthquake on the far side of…
By Anna Kotlyar3 days ago4 min read
Science
How Anyons Help Locate Critical Points
When heated, a magnet can gradually lose its magnetization until it disappears. This is an example of a continuous phase transition: the quantity used to distinguish between two states of matter…
By Igor Danilov3 days ago26 min read
Natural Disasters
Eighteen Earthquakes That Have Not Happened, on a Fault Still Being Mapped
There is a standard reference model of the world's subduction zones, and it includes every Philippine trench but one. The Negros-Sulu Trench is the gap. Seismic surveys have imaged pieces of the slab…
By Anna Werner3 days ago6 min read
AI & Technology
A Machine-Written Disaster Report Rarely Says Where Its Numbers Came From
A situation report is not a summary. It is a dated, attributed document that a response is run from: who is affected and how many, what has been done, what is missing, and which office is saying so.…
By Wilkens Etienne3 days ago5 min read
Space
Planetary Systems Fall Into Two Families, and the Host Star Decides Which
Every planetary system astronomers find gets measured against ours. It is the only one we can examine up close, so it became the ruler: eight planets on nearly circular orbits, nearly in the same…
By Diana Brinker3 days ago6 min read

Browse by topic

By format

About

Articles

The Moon's Radius Has Fallen 42 to 46 Meters, Counted One Fault at a Time

Spring Heat Is Rising Faster Than the Climate Models Say

Moving to a New Phone Left the Transfer Open to an Eavesdropper Nearby

Water Makes Everyday Plastics Chemically Active at Their Surface

Myanmar's Fault Twists With Depth, and Older Satellite Data Already Said So

A Second Young Star Appears to Be in the Phase That Dates Our Solar System's Oldest Rocks

On Hot Days, Delivery Emissions Grow Faster Than Delivery Orders

A Machine-Built Lower-Mantle Catalog, and a Mismatch Its Authors Cannot yet Explain

How Anyons Help Locate Critical Points

Eighteen Earthquakes That Have Not Happened, on a Fault Still Being Mapped

A Machine-Written Disaster Report Rarely Says Where Its Numbers Came From

Planetary Systems Fall Into Two Families, and the Host Star Decides Which