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Over the Arabian Peninsula, the haze that dims the sky is often not smog in the familiar sense. It is dust, lifted off deserts and carried on the wind, and it is one of the harsher air-quality…
El Nino is famously a creature of the calendar. It flares roughly every two to seven years, tips global weather off its usual paths for a season or two, and fades. Ask what it does to the world's…
The message goes out at two in the morning, to the one thing that always answers. Not a friend, not a crisis line: a chatbot. It replies in seconds, never sounds tired, and does not judge. That is a…
Take every stretch of open ocean outside the polar seas, average the surface temperature across all of it, and the number you get has a season of its own. It is not the season most people live in. It…
On any beach, the sea spends the day walking up the sand and back down again. To the people who use satellites to track eroding coastlines, that walk is a nuisance: before an image of a waterline can…
A thunderclap does two things at once. It rolls across the sky, and it pushes down. Part of that acoustic energy hits the ground and keeps going, converting into seismic waves that ripple through the…
Put a price on asking for help and people ask for less of it. That part of a new experiment out of the University of California, Irvine behaved exactly as you would expect. The interesting part came…
In the first week of April 2025, moorland in western and northern Britain was burning, weeks before the start of the fire season in southern Europe. By August, Galicia had suffered the largest…
A fruit fly can find the one overripe banana in a kitchen using a brain smaller than a poppy seed. It gets no training set and no chance to rehearse. Its solution looks unfashionable next to modern…
The spectra had been sitting in a public archive for years, taken for someone else's project, a planet hunt at the European Southern Observatory in Chile. On night after night in the spring of 2018…
Stand on the daylit side of TOI-561 b and there would be nothing underfoot but rock hot enough to run like water. It is a rocky planet a little larger than Earth, orbiting so close to its star that a…
The night of 20–21 June 2024 left the French Alpine village of La Bérarde half buried. The Étançons river, swollen and carrying rock, came through the Écrins massif hamlet and filled it with debris;…