News
Every year, a single bristlecone pine named Methuselah in California's White Mountains adds another ring to a trunk that has been growing since roughly 2833 BC, meaning the tree was already 300 years old when construction began on the Great Pyramid at Giza.
57+ min ago (531+ words) Its exact location is a secret. The U.S. Forest Service will not say which tree in the Schulman Grove of Inyo National Forest is Methuselah, because the previous record-holder was cut down. By the reign of Khufu, who according to the…...
A Cloud of Cold Atoms Just Told Time Without a Clock
1+ mon, 12+ hour ago (314+ words) Strip away every clock in the universe. No ticking, no pendulums, no caesium atoms counting out the second. Now ask yourself a question that has bothered...
Setting California's Forests on Fire Could Cut Wildfire Smoke by a Tenth
1+ mon, 12+ hour ago (78+ words) For a century, the strategy was simple. See a fire, put it out. It worked, in a way, right up until it didn't. All that diligent suppression let dead wood...
Red States and Blue States Are Becoming the Same Unhappy Country
1+ mon, 6+ day ago (29+ words) Pull up the most recent data on how Americans rate their own lives, and a strange thing happens to the political map. The reds and the blues, the coasts...
Florida 'Anti-Woke' Campaign Turned Responsible Investing Into a Political Enemy
1+ mon, 1+ week ago (271+ words) That spreadsheet has a name: ESG, shorthand for environmental, social, and governance factors. Over the past two decades it crept from the fringes of ethical finance into the mainstream, until something like US$30.3 trillion now sits in funds that screen…...
Molecule in Brown Fat That Could Transform Bone Disease Treatment
2+ mon, 19+ hour ago (26+ words) Every time your body shivers or burns a little extra energy to stay warm, brown fat cells are doing something peculiar: running a futile cycle, burning...
When the Rains Fail, the Big Gangs Win: How Climate Chaos Reshapes Capuchin Society
2+ mon, 6+ day ago (209+ words) Susan Perry, an anthropologist at UCLA who has led the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project in Costa Rica for 35 years, has accumulated something genuinely rare: a longitudinal record of 12 neighboring capuchin groups spanning three decades, complete with demographic censuses, satellite imagery…...
Rooftop Solar Is Overwhelming Local Grids. Community Batteries Could Fix That
2+ mon, 6+ day ago (280+ words) This is the paradox sitting at the heart of the renewable transition. The technologies we’ve deployed to fix the electricity system are, in certain respects, making parts of it more fragile. In Victoria’s suburbs, the daily voltage cycle continues. Solar…...
Nearest Jupiter Has Water-Ice Clouds and Scientists Are Not Sure Why
2+ mon, 2+ week ago (354+ words) For most of the history of exoplanet science, finding and characterising a genuine Jupiter analogue was essentially impossible. The technique that has revealed the atmospheres of hundreds of exoplanets since JWST began operating in earnest in 2022 requires the planet to…...
Victim-Named Laws Win More Votes Whether the Policy Works or Not
4+ mon, 2+ week ago (255+ words) A year later, the law had yet to be enforced. The relevant departments didn’t have the devices. Amelia’s Law is, in one sense, a perfect story. A young victim. A preventable tragedy. A commonsense-seeming response. What it may not be…...