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The find that matters here was not made in the field. It was made at a table, with a drawer of bones on it, in a collection nobody had worked through properly since the material came out of the…
Ask a person to drive from a friend's house to a restaurant they've never visited, in a city they know only in patches, and something quietly remarkable happens. They don't consult a lookup table of…
Ask a chatbot for a proof and you brace for a confident, wrong answer. So there is a certain irony in what a team of four researchers reported this week: they asked a language model to help with a…
By the end of 29 October 2024, a rain gauge in the small town of Turís, inland from Valencia, had recorded something almost no one in Europe had seen: 771 millimetres of rain in twenty-four hours.…
Give the same aerial imagery to two dozen geologists, ask them all to trace the active faults, and you might expect the answers to converge, especially the ones from decades-hardened professionals.…
Ask a hydrologist what a "hundred-year" downpour looks like for a given town, and the honest answer is that they are guessing from thin evidence. A rain gauge that has been running for thirty years…
For two decades, the story of Europe's air has been one of slow, hard-won improvement. Cleaner engines, tighter industrial rules, and the retreat of coal have pulled soot and sulphur down year after…
The plan for the Norwegian North Sea is to take carbon dioxide captured from industry, pipe it out under the seabed, and leave it there for good. Several storage licenses have already been awarded on…
On 23 November 1980, an earthquake struck the Irpinia district of southern Italy and did not stop at one fault. The rupture broke three fault segments in sequence, reaching magnitude 6.9 and killing…
Every step you take sends a small pulse of energy into the ground. It is far too weak to feel, and normally far too weak to bother with. But run a fibre-optic cable along the street and watch it…
A jet crossing the sound barrier does not gently speed up past its own noise. It compresses the pressure waves it is making into a single sharp front, and the boom arrives all at once. Some…
A volcano does not have to be quiet just because it is underwater. It bubbles, hisses, and occasionally coughs, and all of that makes sound. Sound travels well through water, better in many ways than…