American coastal communities will experience high-tide flooding as many as 270 days a year by 2050, according to NOAA projections released yesterday that show sea-level rise causing the dramatic increases. NOAA’s annual report on high-tide flooding—also called “sunny day” or “nuisance” flooding because it’s not related to storms—shows that records were set in the past […]
COVID-19 packs its punch largely through uncertainty. If the virus were visible to our eyes, we could have avoided it and conducted the rest of our business as usual. It’s not only that we cannot see the virus itself, but that we also don’t see its symptoms in some of the people who might infect […]
Originally published in August 1911 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “Some unexpected results are found from the movement against the production of opium in China. In the Yunnan, one of the provinces where opium was produced in large quantities, it appears that the poppy is no longer cultivated, owing to the recent measures. However, this has […]
With a five-meter-wide, 57-meter-tall rocket waiting to blast off from China’s southern island of Hainan, the nation is quietly making final preparations for its first independent trip to Mars. When the launch window opens in mid-July, Chinese scientists will strive to send a probe to a planet that confused their ancestors with its constantly changing […]
Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to an unearthly figure with blood dripping down its fangs. You try to scream, but you can’t. You can’t move a single muscle! If this sounds familiar, you’ve probably experienced an episode of sleep paralysis, which involves the inability to move or speak upon falling asleep […]
Cows, oil and gas wells, rice paddies, landfills. These are some of the biggest sources of methane staining the atmosphere today. Methane is the most important greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide, and its concentration reached a record 1,875 parts per billion (ppb) last year, more than two and a half times preindustrial levels. Peak methane […]
The smallest conceivable length of time might be no larger than a millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a second. That’s according to a new theory describing the implications of the universe having a fundamental clock-like property whose ticks would interact with our best atomic timepieces. Such an idea could […]
This year, as hurricanes race into the warming coastal waters of the U.S., an array of seagoing robots will be waiting for them. The torpedo-shaped machines will be positioned in what amounts to no man’s land, places where no ships or humans might survive and where space satellites can’t gauge the potency of storm action. […]
Originally published in January 1898 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “When Jules Verne wrote his fascinating book, ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ [1873], he aimed to show the utmost that could be accomplished by the means of transportation of his day. A quarter of a century later we are near the day when the ordinary […]
Massive dinosaurs and pterosaurs have a newfound cousin: a palm-size pipsqueak of a reptile, a new fossil reveals. Even the name of the newly described reptile—Kongonaphon kely, or “tiny bug slayer” in Malagasy and Greek—is an homage to its diminutive size, as well as its likely diet of hard-shelled insects, the researchers said. This tiny beast reveals […]