Tag: SCIENCE

If you go to Floreana Island, in the Galapagos, you can still see descendants of the giant tortoises that Darwin documented in the 19th century when he visited these islands. From the dock, just weave between indolent sea lions and impassive ruby-red marine iguanas and ask around for the truck to the highlands. It’ll be…

This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Zozu, like any other white stork in Europe, typically flies to southern Africa for the winter. Yet when researchers at Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Ornithology tracked the bird’s path using a GPS logger in 2016, they found that he and a few others had…

In 2008, Paul Karason, a 57-year-old man from the Pacific Northwest, agreed to appear on the Today show. And appear is the best word for it, since he was there because of the way he looked. From head to toe, Paul Karason was the color blue. Not a subtle light-wash tint, either. This was closer…

It's easy to miss the mirror forge at the University of Arizona. While sizable, the Richard F. Caris Mirror Laboratory sits in the shadow of the university's much larger 56,000-seat football stadium. Even its most distinctive feature—an octagonal concrete prominence emblazoned with the school's logo—looks like an architectural feature for the arena next door. But…

Eliud Kipchoge, the world's best marathon runner, runs in Nike shoes. But do his shoes help him run faster? You'll be shocked—shocked!—to learn that Nike claims they do. Kipchoge wears a special version of the Vaporfly 4%, which got its name from a study out of CU Boulder. Funded by Nike, and conducted in collaboration…

For a species whose numbers show no signs of collapsing, humans have a shockingly high mutation rate. Each of us is born with about 70 new genetic errors that our parents did not have. That’s much more than a slime mold, say, or a bacterium. Mutations are likely to decrease an organism’s fitness, and an…

Humanity is entering a confusing time: the Age of the Bizarrely Intelligent Robots. No longer confined to cages on factory floors, the machines are more and more walking, rolling, and hopping among us. But the question is, are we ready for their invasion? After all, interacting with other humans is hard enough for most of…

For millennia, humans have turned to the sky to tell time. Our planet rotates once on its axis, and we’ve lived another day. We divide that day into smaller fractions: the hour, minute, and second. But Earth is an imperfect clock. Its orbit and rotation vary slightly from year to year—the kind of wiggle room…

This story originally appeared on CityLab and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration. In many ways, Essen is the envy of cities trying to move past their industrial days. Once the steel and coal center of Germany, Essen’s economic success in the early 20th century was evident in the dust blanketing the city and sulfur filling the air…

The commissions are coming. Hurricane season hasn’t ended, but forensics waits for no one, so the after-action reports on Harvey and Irma have to get started. The relevant agencies—local and perhaps federal, plus maybe some national academies and disaster responders—will all no doubt look at themselves and others to see what went right or wrong.…