Enlarge / Image of the AB Aurigae system, with details of the object shown at the right. (credit: NASA, ESA, Thayne Currie) On some levels, forming stars and planets is simple: They form where there’s more stuff. So, while the raw material for a star may be a diffuse cloud of gas, the distribution of […]
Enlarge / Illustration of a Oestrus ovis, sheep botfly (credit: Getty | Nastasic) On Wednesday, doctors in France reported a rare case of tiny sheep bot fly larvae—aka maggots—infesting the outer surface of a man’s eyeball. The small, spiky larvae were seen slithering around the man’s peeper, explaining the redness and itchiness he was experiencing. […]
Enlarge / Quantum Go Fish is just one of the many math-y games in Ben Orlin’s latest book, Math Games with Bad Drawings . (credit: Ben Orlin) Adapted from Math Games with Bad Drawings (2022) by Ben Orlin. You can read our latest interview with Orlin here . Of the thousand games I encountered in […]
Enlarge / Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe is at heart a game of fractal structure, per math teacher Ben Orlin, author of Math Games with Bad Drawings . Players must balance two levels, an element that requires them to “Think globally, act locally. ” (credit: Ben Orlin) In 1974, a geneticist named Marsha Jean Falco devised an ingenious […]
Enlarge / Water levels at the Hoover Dam are well below capacity. (credit: Jorge Villalba ) News that Arizona’s Lake Powell is slowly but surely drying up has spread far and wide. The reservoir behind the particular 1, 320-megawatt Glen Canyon Atteinte and power station, Lake Powell plays an important role in providing power for […]
Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) The world will mark the 60th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is known to Russians as the Caribbean Crisis, in October. The incredibly tense confrontation brought the United States and the Soviet Union the closest they would come to nuclear war during the Cold War. The […]
Enlarge (credit: Tony Armstrong-Sly / Flickr) The urgency of action on climate change is a complicated thing. On the one hand, the harm of inaction is real and growing every year. On the other hand, there’s no such thing as “too late.” Plug in some numbers, and you can define a corresponding deadline to hit […]
Two notebooks belonging to Charles Darwin, one of which contains his iconic 1837 “Tree of Life” sketch, have been safely returned to Cambridge University Library, more than two decades after first being reported missing. Twenty years ago, two small notebooks written by 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin mysteriously disappeared from the archives of Cambridge University Library. One […]
Enlarge / The Cumbre Vieja volcano’s eruption was complicated and not entirely what experts expected. (credit: Andreas Weibel ) Last fall’s Cumbre Vieja volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands was surprising for several reasons. Most predominantly, the eruption did not cause tsunamis to spread across the Atlantic Ocean, as some experts had predicted. But for […]
Enlarge / Amazon is counting on the Vulcan rocket, a pathfinder for which is shown here, to deliver a large number of satellites into space. (credit: United Launch Alliance) Amazon on Tuesday announced the largest commercial launch deal ever. The company said it has finalized agreements with three different rocket companies for a total of […]