Barring poor weather or last-minute technical glitches, shortly after 4:30 P.M. Eastern time today, a spaceship carrying two crew members will blast off on a rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The flight will be bound for the International Space Station (ISS), but its true destination is the annals of space history: it […]
For the past few days, I have been thinking of Jean-Henri Fabre, the French naturalist known for lying motionless on the bare earth in the sweltering heat on the bank of the river Rhône at Avignon, his eyes searching incessantly for insects. A patch of barren, sun-scorched ground, as Fabre wrote in his book The […]
In habitats across the planet, animals periodically drop everything to walk, fly or swim to a new locale—and lightweight tracking technology has given biologists their best-ever understanding of these seasonal treks. Wildlife such as whales and geese learn migration routes by following their parents and other older counterparts. Others, including small songbirds, inherit the distance […]
In 2017 researchers from several universities used advanced laser-based technology to peer inside ice cores pulled from high in the Alps. They found the Black Death. The ice-core record showed that during the past 2,000 years, the annual levels of lead in the atmosphere took a sudden dip only once. That period was 1349 to […]
When a massive star dies in a supernova, the explosion is only the beginning of the end. Most of the stellar matter is thrown far and wide, but the star’s iron-filled heart remains behind. This core packs as much mass as two Suns and quickly shrinks to a sphere that would span the length of […]
Farmers have been warned for years that climate change will disrupt growing conditions and crop yields. Pennsylvania State University researchers released findings this week suggesting those changes could come within the lifetimes of many current farmers and that warming could have major implications for the Corn Belt, the heart of the U.S. agricultural economy. Moreover, […]
Mate is a traditional South American beverage drink that is brewed from the leaves and stems of the yerba mate plant, a tree that belongs to the holly family. It’s widely consumed in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, where the mate tree is indigenous. You’ll also find mate as an ingredient in energy drinks or […]
It was a poignant coincidence. On May 11, the evening before Anthony Fauci, longtime director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and public health advisor to eight U.S. presidents, testified remotely to a Senate committee on the dangers of reopening the U.S. economy prematurely, the New York Times published an online obituary […]
The first reference to the seasonality of infectious respiratory disease was recorded around 400 B.C., when the renowned ancient Greek physician Hippocrates wrote the earliest account of a winter epidemic of such an illness. Ever since, we have pondered the impact of seasonal change on respiratory disease prevalence. And rightly so, because even before COVID-19, […]
Originally published in August 1906 Credit: Scientific American Advertisement “William S. Meade, who is said to have made a fortune of $250,000 in a process discovered by him for the preservation of meat, recently died in a New York lodging house, penniless. After he made his fortune, while on the Pacific coast, he befriended an […]