12 Casques & 12 Keys Planet Earth: undeniably gorgeous and endlessly interesting. She’s extraordinarily good at providing fodder for a series on natural beauty. How fortunate are we to live on a planet teeming with stunning scenery and adorable critters? We take it for granted, but we could easily inhabit a drab and dreary […]
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Bloop In the late 1940s, the U.S. Navy began to develop the Sound Surveillance System, an array of passive sonar stations designed to track Soviet submarines. By the late 1980s, SOSUS became surplus goods, as the USSR blinked out of existence. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration began to utilize the system to study the
Webb’s First Lightshow After decades of development and a half-year of space travel, the James Webb Space Telescope finally delivered the clearest images of the deep universe ever captured, as NASA released the first four pictures from the spacecraft. These photos display two points with crystal clarity: the universe is utterly gorgeous and the James
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Sword Mountain In 1964, mountaineer Kyūya Fukada published a book, called 100 Famous Japanese Mountains. He subjectively selected crags above 1,500 meters (with a few exceptions) that excelled in terms of grace, history, and individuality. The list ranges from Mount Fuji at the top of Japan to Mount Tsukuba, which reaches just 877 meters (2,778 feet). Included in
The Moon Rocket Mystery Today’s title might sound like a Jules Verne novel, but it takes place in the present of the 21st century, not Verne’s future 21st century. On 24 June 2022, NASA released an odd press briefing. It noted how astronomers discovered a rocket heading toward the moon in late 2021. They calculated
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Sand Batteries Renewable energies – mainly solar and wind – are the future. They undoubtedly make sense, too. Not only will they arrive on an unlimited time scale, but they are safe to harness and free, beyond the initial infrastructure and sporadic upkeep. With current technology and usage, a solar panel the size of Nevada
The Sedan Crater In our previous investigation, we learned a bit about the Nevada Test Site, thanks to an assist from Stranger Things. There, the U.S. military tested over a thousand nuclear weapons in the middle of the uninhabited desert. Though atmospheric experiments led to mushroom-cloud tourism in Las Vegas, more than 90% of
The Apple II Houses in Doom Town [This article contains very minor spoilers from Season 4, Part I, of Stranger Things. If you haven’t watched it yet and want a completely spoiler-free viewing experience, put this issue aside and come back later. If you’ve already watched the show, read on. If you don’t care about that
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Uranus Rains Diamonds [This article is the third in a series on Uranus. Read Part I: The Tilting of Uranus and Part 2: Uranus Stinks to make sure you’re fully up to date with Uranus.] We have certainly learned over the years that Uranus is a weird place. Uranus tilts and Uranus stinks, but, as we
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Poseidon’s Ribbon Weed: The World’s Largest Plant On the western flank of Australia, 500 miles north of Perth, the ocean meets the continent in a jagged puzzle piece that resembles two disembodied legs. This spot is known as Shark Bay. UNESCO declared Shark Bay a World Heritage Site in 1991. They cited the bay’s enormous
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