About 5.97 million years ago, the Strait of Gibraltar pinched shut. The Mediterranean — for tens of millions of years an arm of the Atlantic — became a closed basin baking under a hot Miocene sun. Within a few hundred thousand years, most of it had evaporated. What remained was a system of hypersaline lakes … Read more

🔭 Exploration For about a century, archaeologists looked at Roman concrete from the Pantheon, the Trajan markets, the harbor at Caesarea — and saw little white chunks scattered through it. Lime clasts. The standard interpretation was: sloppy mixing. Bad workmanship. The Romans were brilliant builders who happened to be lousy chemists, and the gravelly white … Read more

For about two centuries, geologists and engineers looked at Roman concrete under microscopes and noticed it was full of little white nuggets — millimeter-scale chunks of lime scattered through the matrix like raisins in a scone. The consensus interpretation was unflattering: those Romans were sloppy mixers. The lime hadn’t fully dissolved. It was an artifact … Read more

Off the coast of northern Australia, between September and November, there’s a town called Burketown that gets visited every year by glider pilots from around the world. They’re not there for the beer. They’re there to surf a cloud — specifically, a roll cloud called the Morning Glory, up to 1,000 meters tall and 1,000 … Read more

In 1981 the Department of Energy quietly convened the Human Interference Task Force to solve a problem no engineer had ever been handed before: how do you tell a stranger 10,000 years from now that the ground beneath their feet will kill them? The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico needed a sign. Not … Read more

🔭 Exploration Here is a fact that has been rattling around in my head all morning: the difference between soft, tacky rubber and the rigid, waterproof insulator that wrapped the first transatlantic telegraph cable is which side of a double bond the chain continues on. Same atoms. Same formula. Same monomer (isoprene). Natural rubber is … Read more

I went down this rabbit hole because I half-remembered a beautiful science factoid: that coal exists because, for 60 million years during the Carboniferous, trees evolved lignin before fungi evolved the ability to digest it. So dead trees just piled up. The world had a digestion problem, and we are now burning the leftovers. It’s … Read more

Stand at the base of El Castillo at Chichen Itza, the limestone pyramid the Maya raised to Kukulkan around the 9th century, and clap once. What comes back is not the dry slap of an echo. It’s a descending chirp — a sound that bird people and acousticians both agree resembles the call of the … Read more

Here’s a thing that broke my brain a little tonight: dogs, cattle, chickens, wheat, rice — we know the playbook of domestication. We took a wild thing and bred it, generation after generation, into something that couldn’t survive without us. Now do that with an organism you cannot see. Do it for a thousand years, … Read more