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On Jan. 7, 2024, a field team on the surface of Denman Glacier in East Antarctica walked a line about 14 kilometers long and stopped nine times. At each stop they set an instrument on the snow and…
IC 443 and W44 are among the best mapped pieces of debris in the Milky Way. Each is the expanding shell of a star that exploded, and each is driving a shock wave into a neighboring molecular cloud.…
A picture generator does not start with a picture. It starts with a small block of numbers, a kind of compressed sketch, and only at the last step unfolds that sketch into something a person can look…
About 2,000 billion metric tons of snow settle on the Antarctic ice sheet in an average year, and nothing else adds to it. Everything else that happens to the ice sheet takes mass away. So when the…
Two children sit across a marble game. One of them takes a turn and runs into trouble: a box that will not open, or a container that tips its marbles onto the floor. The other child has already been…
Fix your eyes on a single word on this page. The letters at the center of your gaze are handled by one patch of tissue at the back of your head, the clutter out at the edge of your vision by another,…
Astronomers have collected light from far earlier in cosmic history than this. What they have rarely had, that far out, is a case with enough evidence to narrow down what they are seeing. A faint dot…
The word "the" is short. "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" is not. Every listener registers word length without noticing, and that alone is enough to account for most of what one influential…
For decades, the question of who lives next to an oil or gas well has been answered one country at a time. The United States has a number. Canada has one. Each was built to its own design, with its…
Around midday on March 12 and 14, 2024, at the end of the Chilean summer, Millie Spencer and Robert Clasing flew a small drone over the bare ice of a volcano in Chile's Ñuble region. The wind over…
Every image the James Webb Space Telescope sends home is really a stack of images. Its near-infrared camera does not gather light for a few minutes and then read the detector once at the end. It…
Ask a biologist to sketch the bacteria that swim along magnetic field lines and you will get much the same drawing every time: a cell with a neat row of tiny bar magnets inside it, lined up nose to…