Articles

Environment
A Heatwave Builds Faster Than It Fades, and the Gap Widens Farther North
A heatwave arrives faster than it leaves. Anyone who has sat through one knows the shape of it: the air thickens over a day or two, then sits there for a week before grudgingly letting go. Climate…
By Oli Kotyk3 days ago3 min read
Space
Gas Enough for a Small Galaxy, and Not One Star in It
In June a camera on the Gran Telescopio Canarias stared for two nights at a patch of sky beside the spiral galaxy M94. Ignacio Trujillo, who led the observation from the Instituto de Astrofísica de…
By Diana Brinker3 days ago4 min read
Space
Two Tricks of Light Make the Full Moon Brighter Than It Should Be
Follow the Moon through a month and its brightness does something that simple arithmetic cannot account for. It climbs as the lit crescent fattens, roughly in step with the growing area of sunlit…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay3 days ago6 min read
Natural Disasters
One Seismometer Can't Speak for the Ground Three Kilometers Away
A seismometer reports one number for one patch of ground. The house a kilometer down the road has no seismometer of its own, so whatever shook it has to be inferred from the instrument that does…
By Anna Werner3 days ago4 min read
Science
A Pump With No Known Job Ejects an Antibiotic From a Pneumonia Bacterium
Sequence a bacterium and you get a parts list with most of the labels missing. Streptococcus pneumoniae, the organism responsible for a great deal of pneumonia and meningitis, encodes a broad array…
By Gabriela Szalayová3 days ago3 min read
Science
A Texas Fossil Suggests Insects Waded Ashore Rather Than Leaped
Erik Tihelka was leafing through a secondhand Russian paleontology textbook when a line drawing stopped him: a small, many-legged animal from a shale bed in West Texas, labeled a crustacean. He…
By Anna Kotlyar3 days ago6 min read
AI & Technology
AI Health Agents Rarely Beat a Baseline That Ignores the Sensor Data
One program in this benchmark never looks at the data. It ignores the step counts, the sleep hours and the resting heart rates, and returns the same number every time: the average score in the data…
By Wilkens Etienne3 days ago5 min read
Science
The Deep-Sea Vents Said to Have Cradled Life May Have Lacked the Chemistry to Do It
The chimneys at Lost City are the wrong color. Where the black smokers strung along the mid-ocean ridges build dark spires out of metal sulfide, this field on a bald dome of mantle rock in the…
By Anna Kotlyar3 days ago5 min read
Environment
Six Narwhals Carried Sensors Into Fjords No Ship Can Reach
One autumn, a narwhal swimming up Nordvestfjord, a long, ice-covered arm of water in East Greenland, dove down through the cold surface layer into the warmer, saltier water beneath it. Behind the…
By Andreja Jezernik3 days ago5 min read
Science
Two Enzymes Must Act in Sequence Before the Toxoplasma Parasite Can Invade a Cell
Most parasites that end up inside a human cell get there by being swallowed. Toxoplasma gondii does not wait for the invitation. It sets its narrow end against the membrane of a cell and drives…
By Gabriela Szalayová3 days ago6 min read
Environment
Crushed Basalt Dissolves in the Topsoil. Getting the Carbon to the Ocean Is the Hard Part
A tractor spreads crushed basalt across a field, and a number appears in a ledger: so much carbon dioxide, removed. The chemistry behind that number is textbook. Rain and soil acid attack the rock,…
By Olga Schmidt4 days ago5 min read
Environment
Wood Could Store More Carbon in the World's New Buildings Than Biochar Concrete
A concrete frame is a debt in climate accounting. The cement in it released carbon dioxide on the way to becoming cement, and nothing the finished wall does afterward pays that back. A timber frame…
By Andreja Jezernik4 days ago4 min read

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Articles

A Heatwave Builds Faster Than It Fades, and the Gap Widens Farther North

Gas Enough for a Small Galaxy, and Not One Star in It

Two Tricks of Light Make the Full Moon Brighter Than It Should Be

One Seismometer Can't Speak for the Ground Three Kilometers Away

A Pump With No Known Job Ejects an Antibiotic From a Pneumonia Bacterium

A Texas Fossil Suggests Insects Waded Ashore Rather Than Leaped

AI Health Agents Rarely Beat a Baseline That Ignores the Sensor Data

The Deep-Sea Vents Said to Have Cradled Life May Have Lacked the Chemistry to Do It

Six Narwhals Carried Sensors Into Fjords No Ship Can Reach

Two Enzymes Must Act in Sequence Before the Toxoplasma Parasite Can Invade a Cell

Crushed Basalt Dissolves in the Topsoil. Getting the Carbon to the Ocean Is the Hard Part

Wood Could Store More Carbon in the World's New Buildings Than Biochar Concrete