Open with CtrlK — press Esc to close
A bacterium has no nervous system and no hormones, and it still knows when it is drowning in sodium. Part of how it knows is a piece of its own messenger RNA, folded into a pocket that closes around…
Left alone, pure water is remarkably reluctant to freeze. A clean droplet can be chilled to about −38 °C before it turns to ice by itself. Clouds do not wait that long, because the air is full of…
In 1950, a lake called Jancarurish, high in Peru's Cordillera Blanca, broke through the ridge of loose rock holding it back and emptied down the valley. An aerial survey photograph kept by the water…
The Ross and Filchner-Ronne ice shelves are the two largest floating slabs of ice on the planet, and by the usual reading they are the least troubled. Their summers are cold, their surfaces stay…
Draw every known rocky planet on one chart, how hard its star bakes it, against how firmly its gravity holds on, and a line appears. Below the line, worlds keep an atmosphere. Above it, they are…
Line up the rocky part of Earth against the Sun, element for element, and most of the list matches. Then you reach the elements that boil off easily, the ones that need somewhere cool and quiet to…
In a humid forest of conifers and ferns, in what is now Inner Mongolia, the loudest thing in the undergrowth may have been an animal no human ear could have picked up. Its song was made by scraping…
Somewhere off northern Israel, under a few hundred meters of water, the seabed has a step in it roughly 30 meters high. By rights, it should be gone. Sediment carried up from the Nile settles along…
Over the Arabian Peninsula, the haze that dims the sky is often not smog in the familiar sense. It is dust, lifted off deserts and carried on the wind, and it is one of the harsher air-quality…
El Nino is famously a creature of the calendar. It flares roughly every two to seven years, tips global weather off its usual paths for a season or two, and fades. Ask what it does to the world's…
The message goes out at two in the morning, to the one thing that always answers. Not a friend, not a crisis line: a chatbot. It replies in seconds, never sounds tired, and does not judge. That is a…
Take every stretch of open ocean outside the polar seas, average the surface temperature across all of it, and the number you get has a season of its own. It is not the season most people live in. It…