Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
The animal is 322 millimeters long, dried to a yellow-beige, and it has sat in a cabinet in southern Germany since the late 1980s. For most of that time it carried a name: Bathynomus giganteus, the…
Aim the James Webb Space Telescope at a deep enough patch of sky and tiny, intensely red specks emerge from the noise, most numerous in the earliest parts of the universe. Look at the same kind of…
A grain of asteroid dust in a laboratory is a sample without an address. It can be weighed, sliced and dated, and it will tell you what that asteroid is made of. It will not tell you which part of…
The chips that run today's large AI models are kept deliberately overcautious. Hold a logic gate at a high enough voltage and it will almost never flip the wrong way; the catch is that the energy…
For most of two years, Kīlauea kept appointments. Pressure gathered in the shallow magma reservoir beneath Halemaʻumaʻu, the ground around the crater tilted, and within days or weeks lava rose from…
Mowing a solar farm is a stubborn expense. Grass and brush grow up between the panel rows, they shade the cells, and somebody has to keep cutting them. So solar operators have increasingly swapped…
In the peat swamp forest at Tuanan, on the Indonesian side of Borneo, two infant orangutans catch sight of each other across a gap in the canopy and the day changes shape. They rush together,…
In July 2020, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake broke the plate boundary beneath the Shumagin Islands, off the Alaska Peninsula, and shoved the seafloor upward. That is how a tsunami is usually made. The…
Europe's continental shelf already breathes in two ways, and the dividing line sits near 60 degrees north. South of it, temperature sets the rhythm: cold winter water dissolves carbon dioxide easily…
Ask a language model for something it is supposed to refuse, and the decision is usually made in the first breath of the answer. Either it opens with a refusal or it opens by complying, and the rest…
The shape was wrong. A light curve, the record of how a point of light brightens and fades, is supposed to look like a bell or a wave. This one looked like a triangle, and it repeated. Kevin Burdge,…
A drought, in the usual telling, arrives with heat. The reservoirs fall, the air bakes, and the two feed each other. Tree rings from slow-growing pines high in the southern Colorado Rockies now say…