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A malaria parasite spends its working life inside a red blood cell, eating the hemoglobin around it, and the meal is also its problem. Breaking hemoglobin down releases heme, the iron-bearing core…
From an airplane over the Rocky Mountain West, a glacier does not look much like a glacier. It looks like a small patch of white tucked into a fold in the landscape, with a band of gray-blue bare ice…
A safety audit of a new AI model is, at bottom, an attempt to make the model show off. Ask it the dangerous question. Fine-tune it on the dangerous task. Prod its internal workings and see what…
On the morning of June 17, 1996, Mount Ruapehu threw ash across the North Island of New Zealand and dropped it hundreds of kilometers downwind. Airports closed. The paper's account of that eruption's…
Somewhere between the smallest stars and the largest planets sits a population of objects that never settled the question. They condense out of collapsing gas clouds the way stars do, then stall: too…
When a human cell divides, every chromosome has a handle. A structure at its waist, the centromere, is what the machinery of division grips to pull one copy into each of the two new cells. The rings…
In January the sun does not set over Dronning Maud Land, and the flat white top of the Nivlisen Ice Shelf turns blue in lines. The lines are rivers. They begin as pools inland, cut down into the ice,…
In 1961 Rolf Landauer worked out what it costs to forget. Erasing a bit of information carries a physical price that no better engineering can get under: memory is matter, and clearing it gives off…
Walk the waterfront in Kesennuma, a fishing city on Japan's Sanriku coast, and parts of the sea wall have windows in them. After the 2011 tsunami wrecked the port, the city asked residents what the…
The pistol shrimp is one of the most extreme creatures on the planet. Despite its modest size of 3 to 5 centimeters, it shoots jets of water, creates blinding flashes of light, jams military sonar,…
The southern coast of Panama's Azuero Peninsula has the shape of a place where one slab of ocean floor dives beneath another. The faults that cut across the peninsula itself mostly do something else.…
The Delta Flume at Deltares in Delft is a concrete canal 300 meters long, and in February and March 2024 a Dutch team filled it with a salt marsh: blocks of turf cut from the Frisian coast, laid out…