Don't Miss This Eclipse
Marina Koren
Right now, a special cosmic arrangement is sliding into place. The moon has positioned itself on the same side of Earth as the sun. The moon has drawn closer to Earth, and its orbit is tilted just so. On April 8, our silvery satellite will pass between our star and our planet, and cast its shadow upon us. In the United States, the darkness will trace a ribbonlike path about 115 miles wide from Texas to Maine, temporarily extinguishing the daylight. Within that area, in cloud-free conditions, the ...
Joe Biden and Donald Trump Have Thoughts About Your Next Car
Zoe Schlanger
The Biden administration earlier today issued a major new rule intended to spur the country's electric-vehicle industry and slash future sales of new gas-powered cars. The rule is not a ban on gas cars, nor does it mandate electric-vehicle sales. It is a new emissions standard, requiring automakers to cut the average carbon emission of their fleets by nearly 50 percent by 2032.This would speed up the transformation of the car industry: The simplest way for automakers to cut emissions will likely ...
A Glowing Petunia Could Radicalize Your View of Plants
Zoe Schlanger
The gallon pot of white petunias I held on an otherwise ordinary subway train, on an otherwise ordinary Thursday in March, would have looked to anyone else like an ordinary houseplant. But I knew better. An hour before, Karen Sarkisyan, one of the plant scientists responsible for this petunia's existence, had dropped it off at my office. He warned me that my petunia had spent a while in transit, and might not immediately put on a show. Still, I'd rushed the petunia into a windowless room. My eyes...
Extreme Heat Toasted the Caribbean's Corals
Lisa S. Gardiner
This article was originally published by Hakai Magazine.In the Northern Hemisphere, the summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. In the Caribbean, coral reefs sat in sweltering water for months--stewing in a dangerous marine heat wave that started earlier, lasted longer, and climbed to higher temperatures than ever recorded in some locations. In some places, the water was more than 32 degrees Celsius--as toasty as a hot tub. Ever since the water started to warm, researchers and conservationists h...
Crows Are the New Pigeons
Tove Danovich
Every night as dusk falls in Portland, Oregon, the sky fills with birds. While workers make their way from the city center toward their homes, crows leave the suburban lawns where they've spent the day picking for grubs to fly downtown. They swirl across the river in large groups, cawing as they go. A community science project recently recorded 22,370 crows spread out downtown--about twice as many as the number of people who lay their heads in that neighborhood.Across North America, crow populatio...
How Long Should a Species Stay on Life Support?
Katherine J. Wu
Updated at 6:50 p.m. ET on March 15, 2024At about 3:30 a.m., four hours into our drive, Travis Livieri's phone began to thrum. "I've got a ferret for you," a voice crackled through the static. The animal in question was one of North America's most endangered mammals, for which the next hour might be the strangest of her life; for Livieri, the wildlife biologist tasked with saving her, it would be one of thousands of interventions he's made to prevent her kind from permanently vanishing. Over the ...
The Most Powerful Rocket in History Had a Good Morning
Marina Koren
SpaceX has once again launched the most powerful rocket in history into the sky, and this time, the mission seems to have passed most of its key milestones. Starship took off without a hitch this morning, separated from its booster, and cruised through space for a while before SpaceX lost contact with it. Instead of splashing down in the ocean as planned, Starship seems to have been destroyed during reentry in Earth's atmosphere.The flight was the third try in an ambitious testing campaign that b...