The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Nearly a century ago, the physicist Erwin Schrödinger called attention to a quirk of the quantum world that has fascinated and vexed researchers ever since. When quantum particles such as atoms interact, they shed their individual identities in favor of …
Read More »California Can Slake the Thirst of Its Farms by Storing Water Underground
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. A new UC Riverside study on California agriculture and climate proposes a plan for new water capture, storage, and distribution systems throughout California that will sustain agriculture and keep up with climate trajectories. Available …
Read More »America’s Dairy Farms Have Vanished
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Milton Orr looked across the rolling hills in northeast Tennessee. “I remember when we had over 1,000 dairy farms in this county. Now we have less than 40,” Orr, an agriculture adviser for Greene County, Tennessee, told me …
Read More »The Multiple Ways Climate Change Threatens to Make Migraines Worse
Migraines have long had an intimate relationship with the elements. Alongside stress and hormones, fluctuations in meteorological conditions are one of the most commonly cited triggers for an attack. “Patients will often say that they can predict the weather,” says Vincent Martin, director of the Headache and Facial Pain Center …
Read More »The Titan Submersible Disaster Hearings Paint a Damning Picture
Four days, 10 witnesses, and dozens of exhibits in the US Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation hearing on the Titan submersible implosion have made public a flood of information about the doomed vessel’s design and operation. But one thing the hearings have not yet explained is why the submersible …
Read More »Unlock the Secret of a Gravity-Defying Parkour Stunt—With Physics!
This looks like something out of a video game, but it's for real. Some parkour masters can scale a building by jumping back and forth between two facing vertical surfaces, zigzagging upward. Seriously, check it out right now, I'll wait. (It's the move that starts at 0:10 in the clip.) …
Read More »Strange Visual Auras Could Hold the Key to Better Migraine Treatments
There is no one experience of “aura.” For some, it starts with white glitter at the edge of their vision like half-seen falling stars; others find faces distorted or words suddenly difficult to form. Science journals collect unusual cases, like Oliver Sacks’ account of waking to find his nurse had …
Read More »Everything You Need to Know About the WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit 2024
Returning for its second edition this October in Berlin, the WIRED & Octopus Energy Tech Summit is bringing together Europe’s leading experts and visionaries in the green energy sector to explore how to accelerate the creation of a fully carbon-free energy system. Last year’s summit focused on the urgent need …
Read More »The Outrageous Scheme to Capture and Sell Greenland’s Meltwater
Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce in many countries, but not in Greenland. Its ice sheet contains around 6.5 percent of the world’s fresh water, and over 350 trillion liters are estimated to run into the ocean annually. And with climate change accelerating Arctic melting, more and more of Greenland’s …
Read More »Project 2025 Would Drastically Cut Support for Carbon Removal
Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a …
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