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Picture a kangaroo the weight of the biggest reds alive today, but built wrong for the part: too stocky, too muscular, and by most reckoning barely able to hop. Protemnodon tumbuna seems to have…
The physics of climate change runs on decades and centuries. Politics runs on the last hot summer. A new modeling study asks what happens when you wire the two together and let the short clock start…
Imagine a field that has been tested. Someone takes soil cores, measures the microplastic in them, compares the result against the concentration at which harm is expected, and finds the field is…
In 1995, two Swiss astronomers watched a star named 51 Pegasi lurch toward and away from Earth on a four-day beat, and read in that tiny rhythm the presence of an unseen planet. The wobble was the…
Watch a fresh iceberg roll over in Greenland's Ilulissat Icefjord and, for a while, it wears two colors. The part that rode above the waterline is the flat white of ordinary glacier ice. But the…
In March 1974, as Mariner 10 swept past Mercury for the first time, its instruments recorded something nobody had ordered: bursts of energetic electrons, arriving in gusts, around a planet that had…
A tray of particles sits under an infrared microscope. Each one has been picked out of seawater, or a sediment core, or the gut of a fish, and each one has to be interrogated separately: a spectrum…
Nobody has ever put a thermometer 5,000 kilometers down. The temperature at Earth's center is inferred, not measured, and one of the load-bearing numbers behind that inference is the melting point of…
Energy inside molecules does not simply teleport from one place to the next. It has to be carried, and some kinds of energy are far harder to carry than others. The stubborn case is the "triplet," a…
A museum drawer of songbird skeletons does not look like a story. It looks like a lot of small, pale, similar bones. Sparrows, finches, warblers, thrushes: the group biologists call Passeriformes…
At 854 metres up in the southern Norwegian mountains, Lake Tesse holds a puzzle that has nothing to do with how the fish got caught and everything to do with how they got there at all. When the ice…
Stretch a rubber band and it eventually snaps. Pour honey and it just keeps flowing, however hard you pull. That contrast is one of the first things anyone learns about matter: solids can fracture,…