During a solar eclipse, the moon slides in front of the sun, blocking it perfectly, and a swath of the world goes dark. And on August 21, that darkness will pass from west to east, from Oregon to South Carolina. For the millions watching, it will be an awe-inspiring event, as the moon blocks an […]
The Tsimane’ people of the Amazon (pronounced chee-MAH-nay, roughly) hunt, farm, and forage. They don’t have a lot of technology. And if you talk to them about the colors they see in the world, they say some pretty interesting things. For objects that are what an English speaker would probably describe as white, black, or […]
Like many thrifty business owners, officials at the Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia, South Carolina, were banking on reducing their carbon footprint and saving money when they installed rooftop solar panels during a big expansion in 2015. In fact, since the panels went up, the zoo has saved more than $8,500 on its electric bill by […]
Google can’t resist a moon shot, but this one is literal: A decade ago, the company announced the Google Lunar X Prize—$20 million for the first private firm to build a robot that can soft-land on the surface of the moon, travel 500 meters, and beam hi-def video back to Earth. Now, after multiple extensions […]
Last month, Phoenix enduring a blistering heat wave, with temperatures so high that airport officials had to cancel dozens of flights. The reason was two-fold. First off, some jet engines risk catching on fire in extreme heat. And when air gets hot, it expands and becomes less dense—so an airplane’s wings can’t generate enough lift […]
Space is a big place, but our upper atmosphere isn’t. Rapidly increasing numbers of satellites orbit there, in addition to innumerable bits of space debris, and rockets fly through it on missions to the moon, Mars, asteroids, and deep space. President Trump’s newly revived National Space Council will have to manage this busy region and […]
Intelligence is not a quality to attribute lightly to microbes. There is no reason to think that bacteria, slime molds and similar single-cell forms of life have awareness, understanding or other capacities implicit in real intellect. But particularly when these cells commune in great numbers, their startling collective talents for solving problems and controlling their […]
Picture Jupiter. Even if you're a total space junkie, your mental image is probably an orange and white-striped planet with a big red dot in the southern hemisphere. Jupiter's red spot—a storm with a diameter larger than Earth's—has been the planet's most conspicuous feature for centuries, and was definitely the answer to a question on […]
The newest member of Yelp's security team wakes just after 8 pm, ready to begin its rounds. It traverses the lobby, gliding over polished concrete toward a small recess in the corner, where it inspects the emergency exit tucked inside. Last year, burglars tried to breach the office by rending the door from the building, […]
Sixty years ago, a team of scientists went looking for yellow fever in the jungles that line the northwestern edge of Lake Victoria. What they found instead, in the blood of a rhesus monkey, was a new virus, one they named for the area’s dense vegetation: Uganda’s Zika Forest. Within a few years, Zika virus […]