Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.
We have done our part to share, perhaps erroneously, that honeybees are in trouble. We hope we have been wrong:
For years, people have understood them to be at imminent risk of extinction, despite evidence to the contrary. Why?
Everyone, for so long, has been worried about the honeybees. Continue reading
Thanks to Hanna Rosin, an Atlantic writer whose podcast conversation with this author brought the book above to my attention:
If Plants Could Talk
Some scientists are starting to reopen a provocative debate: Are plants intelligent?
When I was a kid, my best friend’s mother had a habit of singing arias to her houseplants. Continue reading
Baobab trees in Madagascar.
Photograph: Dave Carr/Getty Images
Ancient oak trees in Glastonbury, Somerset. Photograph: Eddie Linssen/Alamy
I acknowledge my enthusiasm for the idea that there is something going on between trees. I always want to hear more about it. Those who know me well joke that I am anti-woo-woo; but this one topic betrays a soft spot for the as-yet not fully explained. So I am thankful to Daniel Immerwahr for reminding me of the boundaries of what we know (so far):
A bristlecone pine tree, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth. Photograph: Piriya Photography/Getty Images
Mother trees and socialist forests: is the ‘wood-wide web’ a fantasy?
In the past 10 years the idea that trees communicate with and look after each other has gained widespread currency. But have these claims outstripped the evidence?
There are a lot of humans. Teeming is perhaps an unkind word, but when 8 billion people cram themselves on to a planet that, three centuries before, held less than a tenth of that number, it seems apt. Eight billion hot-breathed individuals, downloading apps and piling into buses and shoving their plasticky waste into bins – it is a stupefying and occasionally sickening thought. Continue reading
Art works by Aletheia Casey
Thanks, as always, to Elizabeth Kolbert for illumination on this mystery:
The “Epic Row” Over a New Epoch
Scientists, journalists, and artists often say that we live in the Anthropocene, a new age in which humans shape the Earth. Why do some leading geologists reject the term?
A few months into the third millennium, a group called the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (I.G.B.P.) held a meeting in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Among the researchers in attendance was Paul Crutzen, an atmospheric chemist best known for his research on ozone-depleting chemicals, such as chlorofluorocarbons. Continue reading
The plant will be powered by geothermal energy. Francesca Jones for The New York Times
David Gelles in the New York Times furthers our understanding of the expanding use of carbon capture, and the motives of the key actors utilizing this technology:
Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
On a windswept Icelandic plateau, an international team of engineers and executives is powering up an innovative machine designed to alter the very composition of Earth’s atmosphere.
“Collector containers” where air is pulled in. Francesca Jones for The New York Times
If all goes as planned, the enormous vacuum will soon be sucking up vast quantities of air, stripping out carbon dioxide and then locking away those greenhouse gases deep underground in ancient stone — greenhouse gases that would otherwise continue heating up the globe.
Just a few years ago, technologies like these, that attempt to re-engineer the natural environment, were on the scientific fringe. They were too expensive, too impractical, too sci-fi. Continue reading
Although all the planet’s killer whales are currently considered a single species (Orcinus orca), some of the world’s leading experts are proposing to split them into three species. Photo by imagebroker.com/Alamy Stock Photo
Hakai is the go-to magazine for marine stories, and we hope to see more work of Craig Welch, the science journalist who wrote the article below, in the future:
Meet the Killer Whales You Thought You Knew
The iconic marine mammals may not belong to one species but several. Surprise!
Transient, or Bigg’s, killer whales, not only look, sound, and act differently than their resident killer whale neighbors, they might be an entirely different species. Danita Delimont Creative/Alamy Stock Photo
John Ford still recalls the first time he heard them. He’d been puttering around the Deserters Group archipelago, a smattering of spruce- and cedar-choked islands in Queen Charlotte Strait, between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. He was piloting a small skiff and trailing a squad of six killer whales. Ford, then a graduate student, had been enamored with cetacean sounds since listening to belugas chirp while he worked part-time at the Vancouver Aquarium as a teenager. Now here he was, on August 12, 1980, tracking the underwater conversations of wild killer whales through a borrowed hydrophone. Continue reading
A queen Solenopsis invicta, an invasive fire ant. Photo by Alex Wild
John Whitfield, author of this article in Aeon, is a science journalist whose writing has appeared in Nature, among publications:
A polygyne population of red imported fire ants at Brackenridge Field. Austin, Texas, USA. Photo by Alexander Wild
Over the past four centuries quadrillions of ants have created a strange and turbulent global society that shadows our own
It is a familiar story: a small group of animals living in a wooded grassland begin, against all odds, to populate Earth. At first, they occupy a specific ecological place in the landscape, kept in check by other species. Then something changes. The animals find a way to travel to new places. They learn to cope with unpredictability. They adapt to new kinds of food and shelter. They are clever. And they are aggressive. Continue reading
A white-tailed eagle swoops toward the water’s surface with an adult grey seal directly beneath. Clare Jacobs
We had not heard of this branch of science before, so we thank Douglas Main and the New York Times for this:
A Seal’s Spray Adds a Chapter to the Science of Spitting
The observation suggests that seals join cobras, archerfish and other animals known to spit, although researchers can only speculate about the reason for the mammal’s expectoration.
On Jan. 3, 2022, Clare Jacobs, a bird-watcher, was delighted to spot a rare white-tailed eagle, or Haliaeetus albicilla, at a nature reserve on the Isle of Wight in southern England. These birds, also known as sea eagles or ernes, vanished from the region some 250 years ago, but more than two dozen birds have been released on the island since 2019. Continue reading
In weighing their decision, scientists considered the effect on the world of nuclear activity. A 1946 test blast over Bikini atoll. Jack Rice/Associated Press
Yesterday we learned that scientists declined the invitation to officially declare us in a new age:
A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet.
The Triassic was the dawn of the dinosaurs. The Paleogene saw the rise of mammals. The Pleistocene included the last ice ages.
Is it time to mark humankind’s transformation of the planet with its own chapter in Earth history, the “Anthropocene,” or the human age?
Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it. Continue reading
Shawn Heinrichs
Marine biologists are full of surprises, and those who study whales sometimes give the best surprises. Thanks to Ross Andersen and The Atlantic for this story:
HOW FIRST CONTACT WITH WHALE CIVILIZATION COULD UNFOLD
If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say?
One night last winter, over drinks in downtown Los Angeles, the biologist David Gruber told me that human beings might someday talk to sperm whales. In 2020, Gruber founded Project CETI with some of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence researchers, and they have so far raised $33 million for a high-tech effort to learn the whales’ language. Gruber said that they hope to record billions of the animals’ clicking sounds with floating hydrophones, and then to decipher the sounds’ meaning using neural networks. I was immediately intrigued. For years, I had been toiling away on a book about the search for cosmic civilizations with whom we might communicate. This one was right here on Earth. Continue reading
Thanks to Yale Climate Connections for sharing Max Graham’s article at Grist:
How much carbon can farmers store in their soil? Nobody’s sure.
Advocates say the long-awaited farm bill could help fix that.
Dirt, it turns out, isn’t just worm poop. It’s also a humongous receptacle of carbon, some 2.5 trillion tons of it — three times more than all the carbon in the atmosphere. Continue reading
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani
Our thanks to Asher Elbein, writing in The Atlantic, for this:
Scientists have discovered that a mysterious behavior might come down to air.
On a shelf lined with terra-cotta pots, herbs bend their stems toward the nearest window. In a field of golden wildflowers, leaves rotate with the path of the sun. In a dappled forest, vines twine up trees, reaching ever upward and away from the dark. Continue reading
People work to reforest Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania circa 1934.
Photograph: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Planting trees, we have noted, is smart policy. Some campaigns may have stretched beyond scientific evidence, but science has given us plenty to go on:
Very cool: trees stalling effects of global heating in eastern US, study finds
Vast reforestation a major reason for ‘warming hole’ across parts of US where temperatures have flatlined or cooled
Civilian Conservation Corps workers plant 15,000,000 trees across the wastelands of southern Mississippi on 11 April 1940. They are part of the United Forest Service which will re-establish forests destroyed by logging and lumbering operations decades ago. Photograph: AP
Trees provide innumerable benefits to the world, from food to shelter to oxygen, but researchers have now found their dramatic rebound in the eastern US has delivered a further, stunning feat – the curtailing of the soaring temperatures caused by the climate crisis.
While the US, like the rest of the world, has heated up since industrial times due to the burning of fossil fuels, scientists have long been puzzled by a so-called “warming hole” over parts of the US south-east where temperatures have flatlined, or even cooled, despite the unmistakable broader warming trend. Continue reading
Forget cerulean — a bright, clear sky is actually dominated by ultraviolet light. Humans can’t see ultraviolet light, but many birds can. “Their sky will be essentially an ultraviolet sky,” said Daniel Hanley, a sensory ecologist at George Mason University.
Birds have gotten more attention in our pages than any other person, place or thing since we first started. Today that attention is focused on their sight:
A Bird’s-Eye View of a Technicolor World
Scientists have devised a new video system that reveals how animals see color, and us.
Is the sky truly blue?
Getty
We always appreciate Katherine J. Wu‘s writings on nature, especially her use of archival material to make a point:
Grizzly Bears Are Mostly Vegan
But humans made them more carnivorous.
On the subject of grizzly bears, the San Francisco Call—a short-lived newspaper that went out of print in 1913—wasn’t what you’d call kind. Continue reading
Credit: Thomas Vijayan
We encourage you to go to Nature to see the entire selection, if you think this one is amazing:
Melt warning. This shot of melt water pouring through the Austfonna ice cap on the Arctic island of Nordaustlandet, Norway, won the Nature category in the 2023 Drone Photo Awards. “I have visited this place several times before, but last year it was disheartening to witness the sea ice melting as early as June,” said photographer Thomas Vijayan.
Harvard staff writer Anne J. Manning writes about an event with the author and illustrator of this new book, discussing their remarkable collaboration:
CalTech’s Kip Thorne and Chapman University’s Lia Halloran visit Harvard to discuss their collaboration. Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer
Nobel-winning physicist, artist illustrate universe’s ‘warped side’
New book seeks to demystify complex science from black holes to time travel
Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist Kip Thorne has spent his career describing, through mathematics, some of the deepest mysteries of the universe. His latest project takes on similar material, but through poetry and paintings.
© 2023 by Lia Halloran
A nearly two-decade collaboration with artist Lia Halloran has extracted from Thorne’s brain the pictures that accompany those highly technical descriptions and brought them to life in their new book, “The Warped Side of the Universe: An Odyssey Through Black Holes, Wormholes, Time Travel, and Gravitational Waves.” The weighty tome blends complex science with whimsical art and features more than 300 ink-on-film paintings by Halloran alongside poetry by Thorne.
Paintings that accompany the poems “A Black Hole is Made from Tendices/of Stretching and Squeezing Space and/ a Chaotic Singularity” and “When Orbiting Black Holes Collide:/Spiraling Vortices/ Morph into Gravity Waves.” © 2023 by Lia Halloran
Thorne, the 2017 Nobel laureate in physics and emeritus theoretical physics professor at the California Institute of Technology, and Halloran, associate professor at Chapman University, shared the story behind their partnership at a Harvard Science Book Talk last week, moderated by MIT physicist and humanities Professor Alan Lightman (one of Thorne’s former students at CalTech).
The book, said Thorne, is not meant to teach the particulars of astrophysical concepts, but rather to “convey the essence of the ideas, the feeling, the experience of the ideas, without going into the technical details — like I do in my other life.” Continue reading
Carl Recine/Reuters
Kate Marvel is a climate scientist at the environmental nonprofit Project Drawdown, and was a lead author on the Fifth National Climate Assessment. She has well-informed opinions and as we have noted before, she knows how to express them clearly:
I’m a Climate Scientist. I’m Not Screaming Into the Void Anymore.
Two and a half years ago, when I was asked to help write the most authoritative report on climate change in the United States, I hesitated. Did we really need another warning of the dire consequences of climate change in this country? Continue reading
O’Keefe’s team designed bat boxes that offer a wide range of interior temperatures. Joy O’Keefe
We have pointed to stories about activism and entrepreneurship in the interest of protecting animal habitat plenty of times, but not so much on the science of the field work. As part of its Climate Desk collaboration Mother Jones shares this article originally published by Undark, written by Marta Zaraska, that addresses some of the science of species-specific safe spaces:
Inside Scientists’ Race to Create Safe Refuges for Animals
Climate crisis is destroying habitats. Can technology help create new ones?
Conservation ecologist Ox Lennon simulated stacks of rocks that would create crevices big enough for skinks, but too small for mice. Courtesy Ox Lennon
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. They considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely inside. Continue reading
The primary author of this book is one of the pioneers of AI, so what he has to say about it as a dilemma is relevant. From a recent conversation he had with Sam Harris my takeaway was that while I do not have much agency in the dilemma, it is better for me to understand it than ignore it. Containment is not, apparently, an option. So what can I do? In this book review, a quicker version of the same message, and the only option may be to ponder it:
The Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleyman review – a tech tsunami
The co-founder of DeepMind issues a terrifying warning about AI and synthetic biology – but how seriously should we take it?
On 22 February 1946, George Kennan, an American diplomat stationed in Moscow, dictated a 5,000-word cable to Washington. In this famous telegram, Kennan warned that the Soviet Union’s commitment to communism meant that it was inherently expansionist, and urged the US government to resist any attempts by the Soviets to increase their influence. This strategy quickly became known as “containment” – and defined American foreign policy for the next 40 years. Continue reading
Organikos 