X-ray beams aren’t used just by doctors to see inside your body and tell whether you have a broken bone. More powerful beams made up of very short flashes of X-rays can help scientists peer into the structure of individual atoms and molecules and differentiate types of elements.
But getting an X-ray laser beam that delivers super short...
Hurricane Idalia blew a flamboyance, or flock, of 300-400 flamingos[1] that was likely migrating between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba off course in August 2023 and unceremoniously deposited the birds across a wide swath of the eastern United States, from Florida’s Gulf Coast all the way up to Wisconsin and east to Pennsylvania....
Weather forecasting is a powerful tool. During hurricane season, for instance, meteorologists create computer simulations to forecast[1] how these destructive storms form and where they might travel, which helps prevent damage to coastal communities. When you’re trying to forecast space weather, rather than storms on Earth, creating these...
We are lizard[1] biologists[2], and to do our work we need to catch lizards – never an easy task with such fast, agile creatures.
Years ago, one of us was in the Bahamas chasing a typically uncooperative lizard across dense and narrow branches, frustrated that its nimble agility was thwarting efforts to catch it. Only when finally...