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For years, the people trying to grow milk proteins inside plants have run into the same wall. A cow makes casein by the bucket because its mammary cells are built to package the stuff. A plant cell…
Most of the galaxies we know live in company. They cluster along luminous filaments, tug on their neighbors, merge, get stripped of gas, and are shaped as much by their surroundings as by anything…
A little before nine in the morning, the seafloor off southern Mexico lurched. Within minutes the U.S. Geological Survey had a magnitude, a location, and an automated damage forecast on the wire; a…
Quantum computers have a fragility problem. The quantum states that give them their power are easily disturbed, and a stray bit of noise can scramble a calculation before it finishes. One of the most…
Some objects in the sky can't decide what they are. PSR J1023+0038 is one of them: a rapidly spinning neutron star that keeps flipping between two lives. In one, it siphons gas from a close…
An elephant standing still, its ears spread, sometimes seems to be listening to nothing at all. It isn't. It is listening to the ground. Elephants communicate across distances that would defeat…
Twice before, astronomers had found IC 3599 already ablaze (once in 1990, once in 2010), each time by luck, and each time after the fireworks had largely passed. The galaxy's central black hole would…
Every atom carries a kind of birth certificate. The exact mix of heavier and lighter versions of an element, its isotopes, is set by where and when that material was forged, and it barely changes…
The place where most of Earth's surface is made lies kilometres underwater, in near-total darkness, along a seam that winds around the planet like the stitching on a baseball. Mid-ocean ridges are…
Set a bowling ball spinning in the middle of a trampoline and, in Einstein's universe, it does more than sag the surface — it twists it, winding the fabric around like a spoon in honey. General…
Every flood map carries a quiet assumption: that the future's worst storm will look something like the past's. Engineers size a levee or price an insurance policy against a "one-in-100-year" event,…
"Cities cause most of the world's carbon emissions" is one of those facts that sounds precise until you try to pin it down. Most? Two-thirds? Three-quarters? The honest answer is that it depends on a…