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Picture a weather model. Its job is not to label a picture but to take one continuous field (the temperature and pressure and wind across every point of the atmosphere at noon) and return another…
Ask a generative model trained on a database of known crystals to invent something new, and it faces a quiet contradiction. Everything in its training rewarded it for producing structures that look…
A hailstone measured 16 centimetres across when it fell over northern Italy in 2023, roughly the width of a dinner plate. Eight years earlier, an F4 tornado tore through Mira and Dolo near Venice, at…
In the Brazilian savanna a capuchin monkey climbs onto a flat block of stone with a palm nut in one hand. It sets the nut down, picks up a second stone, raises it above its head with both arms, and…
Supernovae are hard on families. When a massive star collapses and blows off its outer layers, the sudden loss of mass and the kick delivered to the remnant usually wreck whatever gravitational…
The microphone button keeps moving closer to the middle of the screen. Assistants now open in voice mode, cars and headphones take dictation, and the implicit promise is that speaking a question and…
The dream repeats. For many people with post-traumatic stress disorder it is the same dream, most nights, for years, and the exhaustion it produces feeds back into everything else: the depression,…
Nepal's earthquake record is long by the standards of most countries and far too short by the standards of the fault underneath it. Written accounts of damaging shaking reach back a few centuries.…
European data-protection practice contains a small thought experiment. Imagine a stranger who is reasonably competent, has access to public records and search engines, and genuinely wants to work out…
Most of the wheat that crosses an international border in a given year leaves one of about a dozen countries. Most of the nations that buy it order from several of those exporters at once, which…
No seismometer has ever recorded a great earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The fault runs offshore from northern California to British Columbia, and the last time it broke along most of its…
Spring in the Altai arrives as a boundary moving down through the soil. The frozen layer that has held since autumn softens from the top, water becomes available to roots, and whatever grows there…