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…
Source: Wikimedia Commons
There are landscapes that look like other planets, and then there is the Danakil Depression, which scientists actually use as a stand-in for one. It sits in the…
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…
Walk through the storage areas of any museum with a substantial Egyptian collection and you will find, among the pottery and the alabaster, vessels that once held food. Most of…
Food fears are not a modern invention. Long before anyone was arguing online about ingredients, entire societies decided that perfectly ordinary foods were poisonous, corrupting, or medically dangerous — and…