Quantum Gravity in Flatland (preview)

From its earliest days as a science, physics has searched for unity in nature. Isaac Newton showed that the same force responsible for the fall of an apple also holds the planets in their orbits. James Clerk Maxwell combined electricity, magnetism and light into a single theory of electromagnetism; a century later physicists added the weak nuclear force to form a unified “electroweak” theory. Albert Einstein joined space and time themselves into a single spacetime continuum.

A Tour of the New Geopolitics of Global Warming

Energy security and climate change present massive threats to global security, military planners say, with connections and consequences spanning the world.

U.S. Military Forges Ahead with Plans to Combat Climate Change

The U.S. military's elite forces have always pushed the envelope. And this summer will be no exception, as the Navy deploys SEALs with $2 million of new gear on missions to save hostages, combat pirates, and counter terrorism around the world. What sort of next-generation weaponry, armor, or transportation will the funds provide?

135 Years of Records Reveals Deep Ocean Warming

Her Majesty's Ship Challenger set sail in 1872. Stripped of her guns and outfitted for science , her mission was to sail around the globe sampling as she went.

Radioactive Iodine from Fukushima Found in California Kelp

LONG BEACH, Calif. – Kelp off Southern California was contaminated with short-lived radioisotopes a month after Japan’s Fukushima accident, a sign that the spilled radiation reached the state’s urban coastline, according to a new scientific study.

'Earth Hour' Pauses at U.S. Border

Consider an hour without power, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. Saturday, local time. Organizers say as many as 1.8 billion will join in the symbolic environmental event worldwide. But if you live in the US, your neighbors may think you just blew a fuse.  

Compressed-Air Car Winds Way To Market

Air-powered cars have been on the cusp of reality for more than a century. Sure, compressed air is a clean fuel, but it's not efficient enough to power a car engine that will take you very far or very fast.

How Do We Sustain a World of 7 Billion People? Live Stream, March 26, 4:00 to 5:30 P.M. ET

The world population currently stands at about 7 billion people, and the United Nations expects that to grow to 9 or 10 billion by the end of the century. But populations generally don't stay at the same level for long periods of time--they tend to cycle up and down, and sometimes, if they've grown in ways that are unsustainable, they crash. How do we avoid this fate and keep the world on a sustainable path?

Pupfish, Downfish: Subterranean Tsunami Gives Vertical Shakes to the Water-Hole Home of Endangered Fishes

On March 20 a National Park Service biologist named Jeffrey Goldstein and I descended a rocky incline into the mouth of Devils Hole, a collapsed cave in the Nevada desert 40 miles south of the visitor’s center in Death Valley. Thirty feet down, an arm of water extends out from a deep pool to cover a rock shelf the size of a Ping-Pong table with up to two and a half feet of hot water. This shallow recess is home to 100 much-studied adult Devils Hole pupfish, or Cyprinodon diabolis . Living nowhere else on the planet, the pupfish receive protection from human harm by force of federal law and padlocked gates.

Time Traveler: The Art of Charles R. Knight (preview)

You may not know his name, but chances are that you have seen his work. Brooklyn-born artist Charles R. Knight (1874–1953) produced paintings and sculptures of dinosaurs, mam­moths and prehistoric humans that adorn the great natural history museums in the U.S. His dinos have appeared as toys, stamps and comics, as well as in books and scientific journals on paleontology. One of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s illustrators swiped them for his 1912 novel The Lost World . Some even became movie stars, directly inspiring sequences in the 1933 King Kong and, more indirectly, Walt Disney’s 1940 Fantasia and Steven Spielberg’s 1993 Jurassic Park . Hollywood’s master monster animator Ray Harryhausen, creator of the dinosaurs in the 1966 One Million Years B.C. and other cult classics, based his stop-motion puppets on paint­ings and sculptures by Knight.

How Industrial Noise Helps and Hurts Plants

You can almost hear the law of unintended consequences at work among the flora and fauna of northwestern New Mexico.

Big Kill, Not Big Chill, Finished Off Giant Kangaroos

Around 40,000 years ago, the giant kangaroo disappeared from Australia. So did Diprotodon ( rhinoceros-size wombats ) and Palorchestes ( tapirlike marsupials ) as well as supersize birds, reptiles and some 50 other so-called megafauna--big animals. And now a record of fungal spores pulled from the swamp at Lynch's Crater in the northeastern corner of the continent reveals humans as the culprit. [More]


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Power Plants: Could a Rechargeable Battery Be Made from Paper and Pulp By-Products?

Despite decades of predictions that a fully electronic, paperless society is almost upon us, we still live in a world populated with printed documents. This insatiable demand for plant cellulose –based writing and packaging materials may end up having a silver lining: a component for a new type of low-cost, Earth-friendly rechargeable battery . [More]


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Recycled Toilets Make Path Green

Is the attempt to make environmentally friendly roadways doomed to wind up in the toilet? Actually, it may be the other way around. To earn a green certification, the Meador Kansas Ellis Trail in Bellingham, Washington, included 400 recycled commodes in the concrete .

How Hospital Gardens Help Patients Heal

To get an inkling of what a well-designed hospital garden can mean to a seriously ill child, watch the home video posted on YouTube last August of Aidan Schwalbe, a three-year-old heart-transplant recipient. The toddler is shown exploring the meandering paths, sun-dappled lawn and gnarled roots of a branching shade tree in the Prouty Garden at Children’s Hospital Boston. “He loves to be out in the garden feeding the birds and squirrels,” wrote Aidan’s grandmother in an August blog entry. “They will all weigh 30 lbs. each by the time we leave here!”

Global Energy Hunger Leaves Little Room to Displace Dirty Fuels

Fifteen terawatts. That's 150 billion 100-watt light bulbs burning 24/7 for a year. Which is how much energy humanity now uses annually .

"Horizontal Tornado" Captured by Amateur Videographer

New images of a weird weather phenomenon known as a roll cloud have surfaced from Richland, Miss.

Can Radical Efficiency Revive U.S. Manufacturing?

Editor's note: The following is adapted from the Rocky Mountain Institute's Reinventing Fire: Bold Business Solutions for the New Energy Era .

Green Laser Erases Print

Every year, about 10 million tons of paper winds up in American landfills and incinerators, which is not only wasteful but adds CO2 to the atmosphere. Recycling helps, but even that material has to be repulped and paper-ized before you can use it to print out that recipe you’ll never make. But what if you could wipe the page clean and use it again?

Food Webs Trace the Structure of an Ecosystem [Video]

Life is too complex to be described by a simple food chain. Food webs offer a three-dimensional representation of predator–prey relationships within a habitat, providing a more nuanced view of the myriad connections between species. As the video below shows, scientists also hope to use these food webs as a predictive tool to model how an ecosystem will respond to changes, such as invasion by a new species or the degradation of the web due to the loss of a particular organism.