Antarctica’s Terror Bird Was an Apex Predator of the Eocene EpochThe terror bird — an extinct group of carnivorous birds that once dominated the current territory of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay after the extinction of dinosaurs — persisted between 23 million years ago and up to about 17 thousand years ago.
Miami is 'ground zero' for climate risk. People are moving to the area and building there anywayRising seas threaten to swallow much of the Miami metro area in the coming decades as the world continues to warm and faraway ice sheets melt.
The Mystery of Uruguay's Ferocious, All-Female Cannibal InsectsA tribe of ferocious, cannibalistic Amazons lurks in the grasslands of southern Uruguay. Ok, they’re not the notorious warrior women of myth: They’re only a few inches long and they can’t fire an arrow.
Plant apocalypse: how new diseases are destroying EU trees and cropsThe plants slowly choke to death, wither and dry out. They die en masse, leaves dropping and bark turning grey, creating a sea of monochrome.
Bird flu traces have been found in cows' milk. Should we be worried?The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Thursday that genetic fragments of the H5N1 bird flu virus have been detected in one in five retail samples of milk it tested. This comes just days after the agency first said it found inactive traces of the virus in the commercial milk supply.
A Garden of VersesIn September 1598, not far from the handsome courtyards of London’s Royal Exchange, the bookseller Cuthbert Burby began selling a popular title. Most of Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury; Being the Second Part of Wits Commonwealth was not written by Francis Meres, whose name was on the cover.
Tesla’s Layoffs Won’t Solve Its Growing PainsThis week has been one of Tesla’s worst. The company has cut 10 percent of its workforce, from sales advisers to engineers—the biggest round of layoffs in the company’s history.
How Bird Flu Is Shaping People’s LivesThis is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.
Georgia’s Vogtle plant could herald the beginning — or end — of a new nuclear eraFew issues are as divisive among American environmentalists as nuclear energy. Concerns about nuclear waste storage and safety, particularly in the wake of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in Pennsylvania, helped spur the retirement of nuclear power plants across the country.
Why the lifetime of nuclear plants is getting longerThis article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here. Aging can be scary. As you get older, you might not be able to do everything you used to, and it can be hard to keep up with the changing times.
Startups want to geoengineer a cooler planet. With few rules, experts see big risksSAN JOSE, Calif. — One morning late last year, an RV pulled into a parking lot on the outskirts of Silicon Valley. Inside it was a blue Ikea bag with huge balloons, and metal tanks full of helium and sulfur dioxide gas.
If Starship is real, we’re going to need big cargo movers on the Moon and MarsAs a SpaceX engineer working on the Starship program about five years ago, Jaret Matthews could see the future of spaceflight quite clearly and began to imagine the possibilities.
Dark Energy Could Be Evolving Over Time, Raising Questions About the Nature of the CosmosA new map of the universe hints at the shocking possibility that dark energy is evolving—a suggestion that, if confirmed, would have huge implications for the nature of the cosmos.
Emergence of fractal geometries in the evolution of a metabolic enzymeFractals are patterns that are self-similar across multiple length-scales1. Macroscopic fractals are common in nature2,3,4; however, so far, molecular assembly into fractals is restricted to synthetic systems5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12.
Into the 27-Year-Old Brooklyn Man’s Bedroom“I would get rid of this fake plant,” Rachel Coster tells me, pointing to a real plant. Then, noticing the Dusen Dusen Dash pillow on my bed, she groans. (“Childish” and “very gay guy,” she says.