Tag Archives: science

Lucy Easthope is a professional emergency planner. She helps governments and businesses prepare for the worst. In the age of the permacrisis, it’s a growing profession. “We’re having a little bit of a—I don’t know if you can call it a renaissance—maybe just a ‘naissance,’” says Easthope, a professor in …

In October, Melissa began an in vitro fertilization cycle. A resident of Birmingham, Alabama, her fertility journey to that point had been not just difficult, but harrowing—earlier that year, she had nearly bled to death during a procedure to resolve a second-trimester miscarriage. When the IVF process yielded just a …

A combination of AI, a wild 1970s plan to build underwater cities, and a designer creating furniture on the seabed around the Bahamas might be the solution to the widespread destruction of coral reefs. It could even save the world from coastal erosion. Industrial designer Tom Dixon and technologist Suhair …

The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. When it comes to understanding the fabric of the universe, most of what scientists think exists is consigned to a dark, murky domain. Ordinary matter, the stuff we can see and touch, accounts for just 5 percent of the cosmos. …

For the first time in more than half a century, a US-built spacecraft has made a soft landing on the moon. There was high drama and plenty of intrigue on Thursday evening as Intuitive Machines attempted to land its Odysseus spacecraft in a small crater not all that far from …

This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Picture the minute hand at about 8 past the hour. That’s the slope of Viet’s backyard in southern Los Angeles County. It’s a bit too aggressive for a slip-and-slide. In fact, Viet doesn’t even …

We all know that too much sugar is bad for us. It can lead to weight gain, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease. But it’s hard to avoid. In the US, three-quarters of the packaged food sold in supermarkets has sugar added to it when it’s processed or prepared. …

Wouldn't it be cool if you never had to charge your cell phone? I'm sure that's what a lot of people were thinking recently, when a company called BetaVolt said it had developed a coin-sized “nuclear battery” that would last for 50 years. Is it for real? Yes it is. …

One of the most powerful weapons you can wield to fight climate change is … an appliance. A heat pump is a fully electric device that transfers warmth from outdoor air into a building, then reverses in the summer to act like an air conditioning unit. It’s much more efficient …

Since it launched with a blitz of media coverage in September 2021, de-extinction startup Colossal Biosciences has been stalked by comparisons to Jurassic Park. This in itself is not surprising. For a startup trying to bring back the woolly mammoth—or at least something like it—a fable about the dangers of …