Longread

When dye enters moving water, it stretches into thin filaments, bends, and swirls, making the flow’s vortical motions visible. Gradually, its initial pattern becomes almost unrecognizable. Measuring…

In everyday life, time has an impeccable reputation. When asked, “What time is it?” we usually answer confidently after glancing at our watches. It’s harder to understand what “now” means when we’re…

A plastic bottle holds water, and its polymer walls retain their shape for a long time. But sunlight, friction, and other influences gradually break the plastic down, releasing ever smaller…

Tiny particles continually form in the ocean and slowly sink through the water column. Their movement resembles snowfall, although the process has nothing to do with cold temperatures or ice…

Interactions between plants and insects are not limited to chemical and visual signals. Researchers are particularly interested in the acoustic channel: sounds that plants produce under certain…

When we look at a galaxy today, do we see only the outcome of the last several billion years of its life, or does its rotation still carry information about the Universe as it was before the galaxy…

On July 25, 2019, a helicopter crew over Kīlauea's summit spotted water at the bottom of Halemaʻumaʻu. The pit crater had held a lava lake for a decade. Now its floor sat below the water table,…

Each of the four panels shows twenty points, with lines connecting some pairs. Even a diagram like this allows us to ask rigorous questions about a network. In graph theory, the points are called…

When heated, a magnet can gradually lose its magnetization until it disappears. This is an example of a continuous phase transition: the quantity used to distinguish between two states of matter…

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…

A radio burst from a distant galaxy can help us understand the structure of the Universe. How? On its way to Earth, the signal passes through diffuse gas that is difficult to detect through its own…

On September 1, 2026, the LUX-ZEPLIN (LZ) Collaboration reported an unusual event that its underground detector had recorded on June 16, 2023. The detector is designed to search for WIMPs:…