The bomb arrived in pieces. Workers assembled the device behind steel-reinforced concrete walls in the desert, mating radioactive materials with high explosives. It was called Kearsarge. And on a hot August day in 1988, a crew lowered the bomb through a hole drilled thousands of feet into the Nevada Test Site, then entombed it beneath millions of pounds of sand. Thirty miles away, Los Alamos Director Siegfried Hecker sat nervously in the control room. Seven top Soviet nuclear scientists watched ...read more

10. When the researchers aimed a laser at the graphene sponge, it moved. In subsequent experiments, they found they could propel, rotate and even levitate the sponge using light. 11. In a 2015 Nature Photonics study, the researchers explained that sunlight or a moderate laser beam caused the graphene sponge to throw off a trail of excited electrons that pushed the material, which may prove ideal for light-powered sails that could one day propel spaceships. Talk about exciting ...read more

When it comes to species, says biological anthropologist Rebecca Ackermann, “forget everything you learned in high school.” The classic textbook definition, known as the biological species concept, is a group of organisms that only produce fertile offspring with one another. By this rule, domesticated dogs are a single species — whether dachshund or Great Dane — but a donkey and a horse are not. Ackermann, a professor at South Africa’s University of Cape Town, favor ...read more

Paul arrives at the emergency department by ambulance. Paramedics wheel in the 70-year-old on a stretcher and help him sit on the edge of a bed. He’s wearing an oversized T-shirt and paint-splotched pants. His arms are crossed, and he’s staring at his shoes, as if giving the room the silent treatment. Paul speaks no English, only Portuguese. Through a translator, he says with a sneer that his wife, Janet, called the ambulance. “I am fine,” he says. “You need to let ...read more

On the fringes of the Gulf Stream, off the east coast of Florida, the sea is very deep and very blue. I hold tight to the railing on the fly deck of the dive boat as it rolls sharply from side to side, and look down into water that’s a thicker, denser color than I’ve ever seen. For a moment I imagine that if I leaned over the side and dipped my hand in the water, it would come out coated in blue, like paint. Golden fragments of seaweed float by, escapees, perhaps, from the Sargasso S ...read more

Growing AwarenessAlthough not exactly invented at Burning Man, the practice of contemporary archaeology is fairly new, and still far from mainstream. Arguably the earliest example, and still one of the most famous, originated in 1973 when a University of Arizona archaeologist named William Rathje decided to study garbage in Tucson. As a specialist in Maya civilization, Rathje was well practiced in the study of middens, heaps of ancient rubbish that had provided his field with most of its knowled ...read more