Articles

For decades, every thermometer pointed at Io read the same thing: its skin. Infrared cameras aboard Galileo, and more recently Juno's own JIRAM instrument, catch the glow of the surface and the lava…

The first clue was almost nothing. In 2008, a photograph taken on the east bank of the Lomami River in the Democratic Republic of Congo showed a black monkey with a strange, bright detail: orange…

Every asteroid carries a birth certificate, if you know where to look for it. It is written not in shape or size but in isotopes, the slightly different weights of the same chemical element, mixed in…

Inside the nucleus of a healthy human cell sit a handful of droplets so small they were only named this century. They have no membrane. They condense out of the surrounding soup the way oil beads in…

Averages are reassuring, and that is exactly the problem. When people talk about rain getting heavier in a warming world, the mental image is usually a whole distribution nudging up a notch:…

Two hundred and fifty-two million years ago, the oceans nearly emptied. The Permian-Triassic extinction (geologists call it the Great Dying, and the name is not hyperbole) erased something like 96…

Nothing in the apparatus actually spins. That is the first surprise, and the one that makes the rest of the story hang together. Sitting on a bench at the City University of New York's Advanced…

The land that is best for growing crops turns out to be attractive for another reason: it is flat, open, cleared, close to roads and power lines, and often bathed in the strong sunshine that also…

A comet is, in the most literal sense, a piece of frozen memory. The ice that makes up its body records the temperature, the chemistry, and the company it kept when it first congealed out of a cloud…

For a few millionths of a second after the Big Bang, the universe was too hot for ordinary matter to exist. Protons and neutrons had not formed; instead, their constituents, quarks and gluons,…

Over roughly 34 hours in July 2019, the desert northeast of the town of Ridgecrest, California, tore open twice. A magnitude 6.4 shock struck on the Fourth of July; the next evening a magnitude 7.1…

A volcano rarely gives you six days' notice. Ruang, a 725-metre cone rising straight out of the sea in North Sulawesi, gave Indonesia's monitors almost exactly that in April 2024. This time, the…