See the World Through ScienceA project of ALLATRA

Articles

Environment
What Steers a River of Air Toward Asia's Cities
An atmospheric river is a corridor of water vapor sliding through the air toward a coast, and it behaves less like a storm than like plumbing. The water is going somewhere. What decides where it…
By Oli Kotyk3w ago4 min read
Space
Enceladus Sorts Its Own Ocean Chemistry on the Way Into Space
A chemist who wants to know what is dissolved in a jar of seawater has to take the sample apart first: separate the salts, concentrate each one, then put it in front of an instrument on its own. On…
By Victor Kuklin3w ago5 min read
Science
Injure One Root and Its Neighbors Feel the Pressure Drop
A plant's roots do their work in the dark, and almost everything known about how a plant notices being eaten was learned from the parts that do not. Bite a leaf, and the undamaged leaves hear about…
By Gabriela Szalayová3w ago4 min read
Environment
When Rain Falls, Rivers Get Less of It Than Yearly Averages Suggest
In dry country a river is often a line on a map and a bed of dry stones. Then a storm arrives, the stones are wet for an afternoon, and somewhere downstream a gauge registers a pulse of water. How…
By Anna Kotlyar3w ago4 min read
AI & Technology
A Quantum Memory That One Qubit Can Address Slot by Slot
Open the lid of a superconducting quantum computer and most of what you see is not computing; it is wiring. Coaxial lines run down through a refrigerator colder than deep space, one or more for every…
By Oli Kotyk3w ago3 min read
Environment
In Mice, Plastic Particles Harmed Pregnancy Through Vaginal Microbes
By the 14th day of pregnancy, the particles were almost impossible to find. Whatever the plastic had done to these mice, it had done before the pregnancy began, and something else was carrying the…
By Gabriela Szalayová3w ago4 min read
Space
Astronomers Catch a Young Planet Stirring the Gas That Is Still Feeding It
The scenario is decades old and mostly drawn from simulations. A young gas giant plows through the disk of gas and dust it was born in, and the gas closest to it stops moving the way the rest of the…
By Victor Kuklin3w ago5 min read
Science
Mammal Cells Make Rings of Pure Sulfur and Store Them in Fat Droplets
Elemental sulfur is the yellow crust around a volcanic vent and the brimstone of old sermons. It is also one of the oldest ingredients in biology: microbes built their metabolism around it long…
By Gabriela Szalayová3w ago4 min read
Space
Two Cold Failed Stars Appear to Be Moving With Debris From Swallowed Galaxies
The Milky Way ate its neighbors, and the meals left traces. Stars pulled in from galaxies that fell into ours billions of years ago still thread through the outer Galaxy on orbits far more stretched…
By Diana Brinker3w ago5 min read
AI & Technology
When the Picture Stopped Getting Through, Four Standard Scores Barely Moved
Ask a multimodal AI a question about a photograph and it answers. Watch its insides while it works, and you can see the model's representation of the image and its representation of the words…
By Oli Kotyk3w ago5 min read
Environment
The Weather of 1903, Replayed in a Warmer World
In 1903 the officer of the watch on a merchant ship read the barometer, wrote the number in the log, and thought no more about it. More than a century later that number, and hundreds of thousands…
By Olga Schmidt3w ago5 min read
Science
Two Paleontologists Modeled the History of Fossil Hunting to Find Its Limits
Every fossil dig is a bet placed on a piece of ground. A team reads the geology, raises the money, spends a season in the sun, and only afterward learns whether that rock had anything left to say.…
By Anna Kotlyar3w ago4 min read