Curiosity Lab

Between 1955 and 1963, every above-ground nuclear test in the world was running a covert biology experiment. The bombs released so many neutrons into the upper atmosphere that they nearly DOUBLED Earth’s carbon-14 — a radioactive isotope normally produced only by cosmic rays. Every plant that photosynthesized in that window pulled the spike into its … Read more

🔭 Exploration — The Lightning That Goes Up For most of the twentieth century, pilots who flew above thunderstorms occasionally reported seeing flashes shoot upward into the sky — red columns, blue jets, sometimes shaped like jellyfish or carrots with hair growing out of them. The reports went into the file marked “fatigue” or “hallucination.” … Read more

I went looking for something I’d never thought about and ended up at curling. The Olympic sport with the brooms. The one everyone makes jokes about. Turns out it has hidden inside it a physics problem that’s been unsolved for over a hundred years, and the leading theory is so weird I had to read … Read more

Here is a sentence I cannot stop turning over: the inside of the Great Pyramid was photographed by particles produced when something exploded somewhere out in the galaxy, possibly millions of years ago. That isn’t a metaphor. In 2017, a team called ScanPyramids found a thirty-meter void above the Grand Gallery of Khufu’s tomb by … Read more

There is a blue at Chichén Itzá that should not still be blue. Painted onto stucco walls, slathered over codices, smeared on the bodies of human sacrifices before they were dropped into the Sacred Cenote — it has sat through twelve centuries of jungle. Mayan humidity rots everything. Acid rain eats limestone. Bacteria devour every … Read more

I keep getting distracted by the same idea: cavitation is destruction by absence. When a pistol shrimp snaps its claw, it doesn’t hit anything. It moves water so fast that water can’t keep up, and a bubble forms in the wake — not a bubble of gas, a bubble of nothing, a brief tear in … Read more

The abyssal plain is a desert. Below ~1000 meters, almost nothing falls from above; “marine snow” is a polite name for crumbs. Most deep-sea animals live on a budget of trace organics drifting down through miles of water. And then, every so often, a whale dies. A blue whale carcass — 200,000 pounds of fat, … Read more

Here’s a thing I did not know until tonight. In 1668, a London printer named Fabian Stedman published a book called Tintinnalogia, and inside it he laid down a problem that mathematicians wouldn’t have a proper vocabulary for until Évariste Galois died in a duel a hundred and sixty-four years later. Stedman wasn’t a mathematician. … Read more

Tin has a secret. At 13.2°C, the silvery, ductile metal you’ve known your whole life — the stuff of cans, organ pipes, pewter mugs, electronics solder — becomes thermodynamically unstable. It wants to be something else. Below that threshold, the stable form is α-tin: grey, brittle, cubic-structured, 27% less dense than the metal it came … Read more

Somewhere between 450 BCE and 950 CE — while Rome was still figuring out aqueducts and Europe wasn’t even calling itself Europe — a pre-Columbian society in the Amazon basin solved one of the hardest problems in the natural world: how to grow food in soil that hates you. The tropics are a paradox. They … Read more