Two Melting Glaciers Could Decide the Fate of Our Coastlines
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage. Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily…
How Wikipedia Portrayed Humanity in a Single Photo
Click:Cellulose Supplier In 1972, Carl Sagan was preparing to send humans into space. The Pioneer missions were unmanned, sure—but NASA had asked Sagan to design a depiction of Earth's inhabitants for the trip, just in case the spacecraft ran across some aliens. He designed two nude figures with the help of his wife, Linda Salzman…
The Rebirth of Radio Astronomy
In the early 1930s, Bell Labs was experimenting with making wireless transatlantic calls. The communications goliath wanted to understand the static that might crackle across the ocean, so it asked an engineer named Karl Jansky to investigate its sources. He found three: nearby thunderstorms, distant thunderstorms, and a steady hiss, coming from … somewhere. Jansky…
America’s Clergy Are Teaming Up With Scientists
In May 2015, S. Joshua Swamidass, a computational biologist at Washington University in St. Louis, received a curious email: would he like to try advising a theological seminary? The note was from the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit organization that was spinning up a program to send scientists into religious institutions.…
Scientists Take a Harder Look at Genetic Engineering of Human Embryos
The distant future of designer babies might not seem so distant after all. The last year has been full of news about genetic engineering—much of it driven by the the cut-and-paste technique called Crispr. And at the top of the list: news that Crispr could modify human embryos, correcting a relatively common, often deadly mutation.…
How The Best Jumpers in the World Fly So Damn High
Few people would be foolish enough to go toe-to-toe with Evan Ungar in a jumping contest, but on a recent Tuesday I stood beside a length of measuring tape, hung vertically from the wall of a CrossFit gym in the middle of San Francisco, to do just that. I had no delusions of out-leaping Ungar,…
Flummoxed by Force and Motion? Try This Physics Experiment
You're sitting in physics class, working on a traditional problem involving forces and acceleration, when you start to wonder where these terms even came from. Were they just dreamed up to bring anguish to students, or do they have a deeper connection to reality? The study of physics, of course, is a type of science—and…
What's a Blazar? A Galactic Bakery for Cosmic Rays
In 1911 and 1912, an Austrian physicist named Victor Hess took to the sky in a series of risky hot-air balloon trips—for science. Down on land, researchers had been registering signals of mysterious energetic particles on their instruments. They didn’t know what the signals were or where they came from. So in progressively thinning air,…
One Species Loves Our Climate-Wrecking Ways: Fire Ants!
The red imported fire ant is one of the world’s most invasive species. Its sting delivers a burning poison that kills living tissue. Together groups of ants devour deer fawns, baby birds, reptiles, and almost any other source of protein they can get their mandibles on. They form acres of crisscrossing tunnels with thousands of…
There's Still So Much We Need to Learn About Weed—and Fast
On Friday, US senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) introduced legislation to legalize marijuana at the federal level—a bill called SR 420, of course. Thirty-three states and the District of Columbia have so far expanded access to weed in some form. But with federal law lagging behind, the states have landed in a tangle of rules that…