Picture the two places side by side. On one side of the Atlantic, the Sahara: the largest hot desert on the planet, stretching across the northern third of Africa, defined…
In the Southern Hemisphere summer of 1997, a team from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was doing routine work: monitoring an array of underwater microphones, or hydrophones, positioned to…
We tend to assume that simple things are old things. If an object is uncomplicated and useful, surely someone thought of it long ago. In fact, the gap between when…
Look at Earth from orbit today and you see the famous blue marble: oceans, cloud swirls, green continents. Run the clock back roughly 700 million years and an observer in…
Source: Wikipedia
In the spring of 1974, farmers working land in Lintong District, near Xi'an in Shaanxi Province, were digging a well when they hit something hard. It was a fragment…
Some scientific questions are hard because the subject is inaccessible. Others are hard because the subject is so familiar that everyone assumes it must already be settled. The zebra falls…