Paradise, the postcard Sierra Nevada town incinerated 22 months ago by the worst wildfire in California history, passed a milestone last month on its journey to rebuild from the ashes of 2018. “The Town of Paradise has surpassed the 1,000th building permit issued!” officials crowed in an Aug. 12 recovery update. The occasion marked the […]
Nature often inspires engineering. Cicada wings, for example, have long tantalized researchers with their water-repellent and antimicrobial properties, which would be useful to replicate in manufactured products. But previous studies involved totally removing the wings’ surface chemicals, sometimes damaging the wings and giving an incomplete picture of how those chemicals work together with the wings’ […]
From the Mexican border to the forests of Washington State, the West Coast is ablaze. Dozens of fires have roared to life across the western states, burning millions of acres of forest and grassland. California has borne the brunt of the onslaught, with more than 3.3 million acres going up in flames so far this […]
There is something funky going on in the clouds of Venus. Telescopes have detected unusually high concentrations of the molecule phosphine—a stinky, flammable chemical typically associated with feces, farts and rotting microbial activity—in an atmospheric layer far above the planet’s scorching surface. The finding is curious because here on Earth, phosphine is essentially always associated […]
The devastating impact of the coronavirus pandemic and its economic fallout provide ample reason to reconsider what truly constitutes national security. Such a reassessment is long overdue. Despite the trillions of dollars Congress and successive administrations have lavished on the Pentagon since the turn of the century, the massive U.S. arsenal and fighting force deployed […]
Just because a scientist puts a GPS tracking collar on a wild polar bear does not mean the animal will obligingly keep it on. In fact, these humongous neckbands are purposefully girthy so that if one becomes irritating, a bear can remove it. But scientists have now found a way to use signals from the […]
Early in life, I was especially sensitive to the conditions around me. Minor levels of background noise would spoil my concentration. But as I matured, I developed the skill of ignoring distractions and focusing only on substance. During a routine morning jog through the woods near my home last month, I fell down, bumping my […]
You have to go to extreme lengths to find places on Earth that don’t reveal that they’re part of a water-rich planet. Even the highest and driest deserts, like the Atacama Plateau in South America, still get a minimum of a couple of millimeters of annual precipitation on average (although there are places where we […]
Scientists just completed one of the most comprehensive investigations of Earth’s climate history—and the findings aren’t favorable. They found that the planet could eventually warm to levels it hasn’t reached in at least 34 million years. The researchers, led by Thomas Westerhold of the University of Bremen in Germany, constructed datasets using chemical analyses of […]
Woo-hoo, d’oh, or meh? Which of these Simpsonian reactions is appropriate to the fact, revealed by a 2019 survey conducted by researchers at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education (NCSE), that about two in three—67 percent—of public high school biology teachers are presenting evolution forthrightly, emphasizing the broad scientific consensus on […]