Vinson Massif – Antarctica’s High Point Earth’s basement – Antarctica – is most famous for the South Pole and being extraordinarily cold. The pole put a massive target on the continent for adventurers, leading to the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. The planet’s harshest climate caused those explorations to be rather gnarly. One of the two expeditions that […]
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Lady Tasting Tea A statistician, a biochemist, and a phycologist walk into a teahouse… This setup sounds like the start of a science joke. Instead, it’s a real-life scenario that showcased a potential superpower (using the term lightly) and set the stage for modern statistics. In the early 1920s, a phycologist – someone who studies
Santa Ana Winds In January 2025, wildfires devastated residential areas of southern California. According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, as of 27 January, four distinct fires have killed 28 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate, and damaged 16,000 structures over 57,000 acres. The scale and intensity of this disaster is difficult to fathom but
Adiabatic Heating Furnace Creek at Death Valley National Park holds the record for hottest place on Earth. In 1913, the spot hit 134 degrees Fahrenheit! The park is home to Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America, which is 282 feet below sea level. Death Valley is just 85 miles from Mount Whitney, the High
Katabatic Winds What is wind? The question seems simple, but I cannot recall learning about this topic in science classes in school. In simplest terms, wind is the movement of air. But why does air move? What causes wind? The simple concept bleeds into complexity rather quickly, as new questions emerge. Wind occurs because of
The Coriolis Effect Perhaps you’ve heard that your toilet water spins clockwise or counterclockwise depending on whether you live in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere. This phenomenon is supposedly the result of the Coriolis effect. My next sentence might be the oddest I’ve ever typed: Unfortunately, your hemispherical location does not influence your toilet, but the
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Mount Elbrus – Russia and Europe’s High Point When it comes to mountains, Europe is nearly synonymous with the Alps. Those majestic, stark crags might be the world’s most beautiful and they include the planet’s most recognizable peak, the Matterhorn. Despite its robustness, Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in the Alps, is not the highest point in Europe.
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Lava-Fired Pizza Objectively, a top-five human creation is the pizza. It helps when one of the constituent parts is also an all-timer, the wheel of the culinary world, a miraculous building block: bread. Whoever figured out, accidental or not, how to create bread is one of the greatest humans to have ever lived. Paired with
Mistletoe “the Yule clog and Christmas candle were regularly burnt, and the mistletoe, with its white berries, hung up, to the imminent peril of all the pretty housemaids.” — Washington Irving, Christmas Eve One of the strangest Christmas traditions I recall learning as I grew up was both ubiquitous and absent. The notion of kissing under
I Ran a 50k A few weeks ago, I traveled to New River Gorge National Park to run in a 50-kilometer race. I had never run anywhere near this length, but the challenge seemed fun. Who wants to run a repetitive marathon on random roads when you can do it through a gorgeous forested gorge? Did I