Category: Story

One of my favorite classes to teach is Physics for Elementary Education. It's a physics class designed to address the needs of future elementary school teachers—grades 1 through 6 or so. To guide the class, I've been using a version of Next Gen Physical Science and Everyday Thinking for a long time, maybe 13 years…

Strap in and fire up your warp drives because this week we are traversing deep space and then some. First we’re going to hang around some dead stars, but really it’s cooler than you think. When stars die they tend to leave behind evidence of their existence. Often that evidence comes in the form of…

For security reasons, I can’t tell you exactly where Clay Bolt rediscovered Wallace’s giant bee. But I can tell you this. With a wingspan of two and a half inches, the goliath is four times bigger than a European honeybee. Very much unlike its honey-manufacturing cousin, it’s got enormous jaws, more like those of the…

Videogames can do whatever they like with their physics. They don't have to follow our so-called laws of nature. Yet there are indeed rules in every game, otherwise the motions of characters wouldn't make any sense. But what are the rules? What physics govern the motion of in-game stuff? That's where the real game begins:…

You know the story. Despite technologies, regulations, and policies to make humanity less of a strain on the earth, people just won’t stop reproducing. By 2050 there will be 9 billion carbon-burning, plastic-polluting, calorie-consuming people on the planet. By 2100, that number will balloon to 11 billion, pushing society into a Soylent Green scenario. Such…

Update: NASA successfully landed its Insight spacecraft on Mars. Read more about the descent and landing here. Today NASA will attempt its eighth successful landing of a robot on the red planet by venturing to place its InSight lander—a spacecraft almost 10 years and nearly one billion dollars in the making—as gently as possible on…

From the windows of Ginkgo Bioworks’ Boston offices you can peer down into a grimy vestige of the city’s past. Across the street, workers in yellow-slicker overalls scrub, scrape, and repair the decks of worn-out warships and ocean tankers parked in a drydock. During World War II, 50,000 people worked the docks and the eight-story…

Not far from the test site of the first atomic bomb, high in the mountains above the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, sits Sunspot Observatory. For around 70 years, its telescopes have stared right at the Sun. Normally, that happens without much fanfare. But last week, Sunspot made international news when residents were…

In a 1987 voyage to the Antarctic, the paleoceanographer James Kennett and his crew dropped anchor in the Weddell Sea, drilled into the seabed, and extracted a vertical cylinder of sediment. In an inch-thick layer of plankton fossils and other detritus buried more than 500 feet deep, they found a disturbing clue about the planet’s…

This story was originally published by Yale Environment 360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. It has been a year since China jammed the works of recycling programs around the world by essentially shutting down what had been the industry’s biggest market. China’s National Sword policy, enacted in January 2018,…