Science

When I received my Ph.D. in history in 2013, I didn’t expect that within a decade fights over history — and historiography, even if few people use that word — would become front-page news.

Plants have colonised the vast majority of the Earth’s surface. So what is the key to their success? People often think of plants as simple, senseless life forms. They may live rooted in one place, but the more scientists learn about plants, the more complex and responsive we realise they are.

From above the canopy comes a thundering sound, like the beating of 100 snare drums. The creatures hiding in the shadows between the trees, startled by the intruder, scatter across the forest floor.

One day drought, the next day flood. Big weather swings could become more common as the climate changes. In less than a week, the story about California’s weather shifted dramatically. Just before New Year’s Eve, the state was running out of water following two decades of severe drought.

Consider the oyster mushroom. It’s a mild thing, a pert, often creamy-colored whorl of fungus that goes well with thyme sautéed in butter. But among scientists who study mushrooms, it has earned a reputation for activities more sinister than you’d expect from a fungus found in fine dining.

Scientific discoveries and technological innovation play a vital role in addressing many of the challenges and crises that we face every year.

Millions of years ago thylacines, also known as Tasmanian tigers, were widespread across Australia. About the size of an American coyote, these dog-like creatures with stripes disappeared from the mainland around 2,000 years ago.

NASA and NOAA, two leading atmospheric science research agencies in the United States, have some ostensibly good climate news: Their twin annual analyses of global temperatures revealed today that 2022, like 2021, wasn’t an all-time-record-breaker.

At the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Laboratory in Donner Pass on Wednesday, snow was piled so high that lead scientist Andrew Schwartz no longer needed stairs to exit the second floor. “We just walk directly out onto the snow!” Schwartz said.

This sequence of artist's illustrations shows how a black hole can devour a bypassing star. 1. A normal star passes near a supermassive black hole in the center of a galaxy. 2. The star's outer gasses are pulled into the black hole's gravitational field. 3.

The James Webb Space Telescope is one of MIT Technology Review’s 10 Breakthrough Technologies of 2023. Explore the rest of the list here. Natalie Batalha was itching for data from the James Webb Space Telescope.

Last summer, a snapshot of a single tin of Spam locked inside its very own clear plastic case went viral. The writer who shared the image on Twitter joked that the Port Authority Duane Reade had “finally created something of beauty, a sort of Jeff Koons homage.

When Toby Kiers and a group of fungi experts hiked the Apennine mountains in northern Italy last July, the country was experiencing its worst drought for 70 years.

Fish caught in the fresh waters of the nation’s streams and rivers and the Great Lakes contain dangerously high levels of PFOS, short for perfluorooctane sulfonic acid, a known synthetic toxin phased out by the federal government, according to a study of data from the US Environmental Protection A

In a world getting used to extreme weather, 2023 is starting out more bonkers than ever and meteorologists are saying it's natural weather weirdness with a bit of help from human-caused climate change.