See the World Through ScienceA project of ALLATRA

Articles

Environment
A Restaurant Kitchen's Air Can Be Worse After Everyone Goes Home
Lock up a restaurant kitchen at midnight and most of it goes quiet. The burners are off. The fryers are cold. The hoods above the line stop pulling air. What does not stop is the row of small blue…
By Anna Kotlyar1w ago4 min read
Environment
The Electrical State of Micro- and Nanoplastics
Every day, we encounter the electrostatic properties of plastics, often without giving them much thought. Synthetic fabrics cling to one another, dust is readily drawn to plastic surfaces, and in…
By John Ahn1w ago10 min read
AI & Technology
All Five AI Models in a Simulated Marketplace Promised the Same Item Twice
The seller had one tablet. Inside a single simulated day, it committed that tablet to one buyer, then committed the same unit to a second. The marketplace logged both as commitments. Neither buyer…
By Olga Schmidt1w ago5 min read
Space
Two Telescopes Find the Glowing Spots Along a Black Hole's Jets
X-ray astronomers have spent decades watching V4641 Sagittarii at its loudest. The system is a black hole pulling gas off a companion star in the constellation Sagittarius, and every few years it…
By Kristopher R. Jeffay1w ago6 min read
Science
A Gene in Human Neurons Never Stopped Jumping
In 2010, in a lab at the University of Texas at Arlington, a postdoctoral researcher named Cheng Sun was combing viral genomes for stretches of human DNA, and found some. Two copies of a human gene…
By Gabriela Szalayová1w ago5 min read
Environment
Two Wave Patterns Started the Wind Burst That Helped Prime the 2023 El Niño
The trade winds over the tropical Pacific normally push west, piling warm water up near Indonesia. For ten days in November 2023, a patch of them turned around and blew hard toward the east. A…
By Olga Schmidt1w ago4 min read
Environment
Break Plastic Into Smaller Pieces and Its Surface Gets More Reactive
Order a microplastic from a catalog and a sphere arrives. It is smooth, round and the same material all the way around. It is also nothing like the thing it stands in for. Plastic in the world is not…
By Anna Kotlyar1w ago4 min read
Science
The Oldest Animal Fossils May Not Mark the Oldest Animals
Two slabs of rock, one from southern China and one from southern Mongolia, look much the same under a microscope. Both are crowded with the preserved shapes of tiny organisms. In neither can anyone…
By Anna Kotlyar1w ago4 min read
Environment
Off Gran Canaria, Ocean Plastic Peaks 500 Meters Down
In March 2024, the German research vessel Maria S. Merian held station over deep water south of Gran Canaria and began lowering sample bottles. The deepest one closed at 2,720 meters, in water that…
By Oli Kotyk1w ago4 min read
Space
The Sun May Shake the Outer Planets Loose as It Dies
Isaac Newton thought the planetary order was mortal. Three centuries of celestial mechanics answered him, and kept answering: the four giant planets are so securely spaced that chaos alone would need…
By Victor Kuklin2w ago6 min read
Science
A Pulse Lasting Trillionths of a Second Finds a Superconductor's Real Limit
Ask how much current a superconductor can carry and the most honest answer is a number about its flaws. Push the current up and thin tubes of magnetic field, called vortices, tear loose from the…
By Diana Brinker2w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
A Language Model Designs Better Algorithms When It Is Fenced In
Ask a large language model to write an algorithm for a scheduling problem and you will usually get something that looks right. The code is confident, the comments are tidy, and then it crashes, or it…
By Olga Schmidt2w ago6 min read