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Somewhere in a pension fund's accounts there is a line for property: warehouses, offices, retail parks. It is a large line, and it is the part of the portfolio that cannot be moved when a river comes…
Twelve geologists, six months, a thousand square kilometers of hillside. That was the price of mapping by hand what two rainstorms did to Emilia-Romagna in May 2023. Tens of thousands of slopes gave…
The case for cooling the planet deliberately rests on a reassuring piece of arithmetic. Reflect a little more sunlight back into space, and the global average temperature comes down. The arithmetic…
More than four and a half billion years ago, a lump of ice and dust in the outer Solar System got warm enough to melt inside. Water seeped through the rock, dissolved what it could, and eventually…
Nobody has ever watched a black hole's jet move. The plasma thrown out of the quasar 3C 345, in the constellation Hercules, has been under observation for half a century, but always as stills, an…
A farm in central Nebraska does not fail in an average year. What empties an account is the gap between one season and the next: the bad year that arrives after two good ones, when the loan was…
You get talking to two people you have never met before, and within a few minutes the three of you discover you all know the same person. The ordinary reaction is that the world is small. A paper…
A femtosecond is a millionth of a billionth of a second, and for chemistry it is the natural unit: atoms in a molecule take tens or hundreds of femtoseconds to rearrange. Electrons are quicker. They…
A fossil tells you that an animal lived. What it rarely tells you is what happened in the days and weeks after it died: the messy, crowded interval before burial, when a carcass becomes an ecosystem…
For a long time, Shimao was a puzzle sitting in plain sight. Rising in what is now northern Shaanxi Province about 4,000 years ago, it sprawled across roughly four square kilometers behind massive…
The striking thing about psychedelics, clinically, is how long a single afternoon seems to last. A person takes one dose, spends a few hours somewhere strange, and reports feeling different for…
The headline you may have seen this week almost writes itself: lab-grown sperm. It is worth resisting, because the cells that a University of Pennsylvania team actually grew are not sperm. They are…