A Secret Key to Saving Species Is Blowing in the Wind
Every living thing spreads an invisible signature across its landscape, whether it’s a badger ambling through the grass, an oak growing in the forest, or...
Category : Science
Mathematicians Find Hidden Structure in a Common Type of Space
In the fall of 2017, Mehtaab Sawhney, then an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, joined a graduate reading group that set out to...
The Quest to Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing
Hotta found, to his surprise, that a simple sequence of events could, in fact, induce the quantum vacuum to go negative—giving up energy it didn’t...
The Physics of ‘Sniping’ for Gold
There are three forces acting on the debris. First, there’s the downward-pulling gravitational force (Fg) due to the interaction with the Earth. This force depends...
The Trillion-Dollar Auction to Save the World
Seagrass is the “ugly duckling of conservation,” Carlos Duarte says. He calculated that the plant may put away carbon at 10 times the rate of...
The Looming El Niño Could Cost the World Trillions of Dollars
While the effects of El Niño are more concentrated in the tropics, other regions will feel the heat as well. The southwestern United States tends...
Where to Find the Energy to Save the World
because of the promising conditions in Starr and Hidalgo Counties, Jamie had been helping a handful of people there. The Sage team, of course. The...
How Reality May Be a Sum of All Possible Realities
It’s a radical view of quantum behavior that many physicists take seriously. “I consider it completely real,” said Richard MacKenzie, a physicist at the University...
An Ominous Heating Event Is Unfolding in the Oceans
Illustration: MBARI The dark red areas on the map above show that the Pacific waters off of South America are currently very warm. This is...
A Critical Arctic Organism Is Now Infested With Microplastics
The smaller a particle is, the more organisms it can get into. Plastics can break down so small that they enter individual cells of either...