The Alchemy of UsAinissa RamirezMIT Press, $27.95 Humans have continually wielded materials, from steel to silicon, in new ways to send technology leaping forward. But those technologies have unintentionally molded our bodies and society, materials scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez argues in The Alchemy of Us. Increasingly precise clocks — based on steel springs and then […] More
Allison Fong dangles over the edge of a “river” running through a massive chunk of sea ice floating between the North Pole and Russia’s Komsomolets Island. The river cracked open in the ice just a few days ago, exposing the Arctic Ocean below. Already starting to freeze over, the river’s surface is a dark scar […] More
A curious confluence of atmospheric events has produced the largest ozone hole ever measured over the Arctic. A powerful polar vortex has trapped especially frigid air in the atmosphere above the North Pole, allowing high-altitude clouds to form in the stratosphere, where the ozone layer also sits. Within those clouds, chlorofluorocarbons and hydrochlorofluorocarbons already high […] More
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing its third mass bleaching in just five years — and it is the most widespread bleaching event ever recorded. Results from aerial surveys conducted along the 2,000-kilometer-long reef over nine days in late March, and released April 7, show that 25 percent of 1,036 individuals reefs surveyed were […] More
When giant stars eat giant planets, their starlight may shine a bit less brightly. That dimming could affect how astronomers measure distances across the universe — and possibly even put past measurements in doubt. “You would think the planet would be a small perturbation to the star,” says astrophysicist Licia Verde. “It turns out that […] More
Even if you could measure three black holes’ locations as precisely as physically possible, you still might not know where the black holes would go. Such a trio’s complex dance can be so chaotic that the motions are fundamentally unpredictable, new computer simulations show. The paths of three black holes orbiting each other can be […] More
Once upon a time, there was a swampy rainforest near the bottom of the world. Buried sediment extracted from the seafloor off West Antarctica contains ancient pollen, fossilized roots and other chemical evidence of a diverse forest that flourished millions of years ago, less than a thousand kilometers from the South Pole. The sediment offers […] More
Physicists have finally captured a superconductor’s wave. The first direct evidence of a phase of matter known as a pair-density wave helps reveal the physics that underlies mysterious high-temperature superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance at surprisingly high temperatures. The wave was detected using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers report April 1 in Nature. Physicists […] More
