Category: Technology & Science
Will Your Cat Eat Your Corpse?
Here’s a morbid hypothetical: Let’s say you died suddenly, all alone in your house. Would your cat eat you? It’s a question that’s kept many…
Australia’s Bushfires Completely Blasted Through the Models
As other researchers who contributed to the Nature Climate Change series point out, the unprecedented scale of this season’s bushfires, and the drier and warmer…
Astronomy Expands Its Scope From the Heavens to Humans
Maier’s post tapped a vein among some nonbinary scientists, who felt the sting of being overlooked. After all, if you’re a nonbinary person, it’s hard…
A Star’s Auroras Light the Way to a New Exoplanet
In doing so, they found GJ 1151, a faint star with a shockingly long-lived emission. GJ 1151 belongs to a class of stars called M…
Space Photos of the Week: Triton and Io, Here We Come
Last week NASA announced four finalists for its budget-friendly series of Discovery class missions. The first is called VERITAS (stand for Venus Emissivity, Radio Science,…
Family Farms Try to Raise a New Cash Cow: Solar Power
This story originally appeared on Grist and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. The Kominek family farm is a green expanse of hay and…
Wait, Is That Backpack … Floating?
That’s all fine and everything until the human loses contact with the ground. At that point, there are only two forces on the human–the downward…
‘Environmental DNA’ Lets Scientists Probe Underwater Life
Similar autonomous sampling technology is being used by several research teams to find out what’s living on tropical reefs, where scientists have placed multi-layer structures…
Want to Look Inside a Brain? With Transparent Organs, You Can
Your organs are a lot of things–a powerful computer (in the case of your brain), detoxers (your liver and kidneys), breathing devices (your lungs). But…
Bezos’ Earth Fund Should Invest in These Green Technologies
On Monday, Amazon CEO and world’s richest human Jeff Bezos announced he was pledging nearly 8 percent of his net worth to fight climate change….
How a Princess Cruise Became a Coronavirus Catastrophe
When the Diamond Princess left the port of Yokohama in Japan on January 20, the 2,666 passengers on board were ready to unwind with a…
Cities Fighting Climate Woes Hasten ‘Green Gentrification’
Boston’s plans to harden its waterfront against the perils of climate change–storm surge, flooding, and sea level rise–seem like an all-around win. The only way…
Physicists Take Their Closest Look Yet at an Antimatter Atom
The laws of physics, as experts currently understand them, dictate the following: Every fundamental particle has an antimatter twin. The electron, quark, and muon, for…
What If ‘Planetary Alignment’ Really Could Make Brooms Balance?
The broom challenge is back! This fun little trick returns every few years on social media. It’s supposed to show a gravitational alignment (whatever that…
Cheap Nanoparticles Pave the Way for Carbon-Neutral Fuel
The Svartsengi power station sits on the banks of the Blue Lagoon, an artificial geothermal spring and one of Iceland’s most popular tourist attractions. For…
The Arctic Is Getting Greener. That’s Bad News for All of Us
Right now the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and transforming in massively consequential ways. Rapidly melting permafrost is…
The Atlantic Ocean’s ‘Conveyor Belt’ Stirs Up a Science Fight
Smack dab between eastern Canada’s Misery Point and Greenland’s Cape Desolation is a place where the thrashing of the Atlantic Ocean’s churn sounds about as…
Floating Farms May Help Reinvent the World’s Food Ecosystems
Karma, Courage, and Sustainabetty are special heifers. They have uninterrupted views of Rotterdam harbor, poop on a poop deck, and walk that gangplank to a…
A Car ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off
This story originally appeared on The Guardian and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Two scientific studies of the number of insects splattered by…
Psychedelic Fiber Offers a New Twist on the Science of Knots
One sunny day last summer, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a couple of eminent colleagues out sailing. They talked…