In April 2022, forestry workers started a small number of fires in the Santa Fe National Forest near a remote mountain called Hermit’s Peak. The plan, part of a nationwide program of controlled burns, was to thin out the dense pine woodlands to reduce the risk of a bigger, uncontrolled burn later.The team was aware of the two ways that wildfires usually spread. The first is via direct contact with nearby trees and grass, which is relatively easy to predict. But the second is much harder. Known ...read more

The observation of living cells is undergoing a revolution as various techniques have increased the resolution of microscopy images to the nanometer scale. Cells are crowded, complex, three-dimensional environments. That makes the full panoply hard to study simultaneously because much of it takes place above or below the microscope’s narrow focal plane. One way of solving this is a technique known as expansion microscopy, in which the cell is filled with a polymer that expands when it is place ...read more

An egg is an amazing thing, culinarily speaking: delicious, nutritious, and versatile. Americans eat nearly 100 billion of them every year, almost 300 per person. But eggs, while greener than other animal food sources, have a bigger environmental footprint than almost any plant food — and industrial egg production raises significant animal welfare issues.So food scientists and a few companies are trying hard to come up with ever-better plant-based egg substitutes. “We’re trying to reverse- ...read more

Other than the sloth, whose smile is pretty much permanently attached, the non-human animal most associated with smiling is the bottlenose dolphin. But somewhat like the sloth, the dolphin’s smile is just a feature of the way its mouth turns up at the sides. A dolphin that appears to be smiling at you when it bobs up beside your boat might not be thinking, “Hey, let’s be friends!” even though it’s difficult for humans to interpret that delightful expression any other way.But if dolphin ...read more

Bright, burning lava surging from a fissure on Iceland's Reykjanes Peninsula is so voluminous that it's easily visible to orbiting satellites. The image above, which is about three and a half miles across, was created using data acquired by the Landsat 9 satellite on November 24th. If you look carefully at the left-most extension of the flowing lava you can make out a couple of turquoise-colored spots. This is Iceland's iconic Blue Lagoon, a geothermal spa that attracts tourists from around the ...read more

When I was a kid, I liked to dig holes in my backyard in Cincinnati. My grandfather joked that if I kept digging, I would end up in China.In fact, if I had been able to dig straight through the planet, I would have come out in the Indian Ocean, about 1,100 miles (1,800 kilometers) west of Australia. That’s the antipode, or opposite point on Earth’s surface, from my town.But I only had a garden spade to move the earth. When I hit rock, less than 3 feet (1 meter) below the surface, I couldn’ ...read more

The holidays offer many opportunities for awkward moments. Political discussions, of course, hold plenty of potential. But any time opinions differ, where estrangements have caused lingering rifts, or when behaviors veer toward the inappropriate, awkwardness can set in.Awkwardness is what happens in social interactions when you suddenly find yourself without a script to guide you through. Maybe the situation is new or catches you off guard. Maybe you don’t know what’s expected of you, or you ...read more

We talk a lot about the impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Rising sea levels, heat waves, melting glaciers -- they are all changes our planet is experiencing as the temperature rises. However, these can seem a little abstract if you're not experiencing them yourself. Sometimes it takes a concrete example of just how climate change is influencing not only changes to our landscape and ecosystems, but also to things like ... baseball.The Tampa Bay Rays play at Tropicana Field, a domed stadium ...read more

Orcas can get organized. When hunting for whale sharks — the world’s largest fish — a pod of killer whales appears to target the youngest most vulnerable sharks, ram them to turn them upside done — thus immobilizing them, and will then focus on high value organs like the heart and liver.Although there have been scattered reports of such incidents, scientists in Mexico recorded and studied four specific attacks, analyzed them, and described them in an article in Frontiers in Marine Scienc ...read more

Scientists seeking the secrets of the universe would like to make a model that shows how all of nature’s forces and particles fit together. It would be nice to do it with Legos. But perhaps a better bet would be connecting everything with strings.Not literal strings, of course — but tiny loops or snippets of vibrating energy. And the “fit together” needs to be mathematical, not via properly shaped pieces of plastic. For decades now, many physicists have pursued the hope that equations in ...read more