ManhattAnts In the 21st century, most entomologists would head to a rainforest if they hoped to discover a new species of insect. So, when biologist Rob Dunn taught at Columbia University, he did not expect to be greeted on the concrete jungles of New York City by an unknown critter. Still, Dunn scooped a few […]
A Rocky Remembrance written by Brianna S. The mountains were NOT calling. At least not to me. Each summer, I would see the shimmer in my brother’s eyes as we began preparations for our yearly trip to Maine. Even my father’s countenance, normally grumpy and stoic, would give off a gleeful hum –
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A23a & Taylor Columns In 1986, a gargantuan ice chunk calved from the Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf in Antarctica. The size of this iceberg – creatively dubbed A23a – is hard to comprehend. It was so big that, after it separated, it did not move. Estimated to be more than 1,100 feet tall and weighing nearly a trillion
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The Biscuit Basin Explosion The world’s first national park – Yellowstone – contains over half of Earth’s geysers. Powering this incredible fact is the Yellowstone Caldera, an underground supervolcano. Though currently dormant in terms of overground eruption, the system isn’t extinct and still heats the region, creating Old Faithful and the other gushers inside the park. Worrywarts across
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Uranus Is Cold Really cold. You should probably get that checked out. The amount of light a body receives plummets exponentially as the distance to a star increases (the formula is 1/distance squared). Uranus is just over 19 astronomical units away from the Sun, meaning it gets 0.27% of the sunlight we receive on Earth
Red Adair, the Munroe Effect, & the Devil’s Cigarette Lighter On 20 February 1962, John Glenn became the third American to visit space, as Friendship 7 left Earth. When the craft successfully orbited our planet, Glenn was the first American to circle Earth above the atmosphere. He orbited three times during the nearly five-hour mission, giving Glenn
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The Bone Wars Many progenitors of scientific fields garner reverent reputations as time passes, perhaps titans of inquiry, research, and genius who placed pure scholarship above all else. We tend to view Newton and Einstein as ascetic paragons, infallibly probing the fabric of the universe for nothing more than the good of humanity. Of course,
Parade of Planets Gazing into the night sky can impart a viewer with a sobering sense of perspective. The billions of stars out there. The millions of years the light took to travel from distant galaxies. It’s easy to be overwhelmed with a feeling of unimportance, as if we’re a speck of sand on a
The Carrington Event It was a sight never to be forgotten, and was considered at the time to be the greatest aurora recorded […]. The rationalist and pantheist saw nature in her most exquisite robes, recognising, the divine immanence, immutable law, cause, and effect. The superstitious and the fanatical had dire forebodings, and thought it
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Sunspots, Solar Flares, & CMEs In Part I of this series, we discovered the Sun emits more than just visible light. The outermost portion of the Sun – the corona – becomes so hot that particles gather enough kinetic energy to escape the star’s gravity. As these masses flee the Sun, they become the solar wind, moving
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