The most interesting oceans in the solar system are the ones we can't see — hidden seas under the ice of Europa and Enceladus. This year the case they could host life grew stronger, and the robots built to find it are being tested under Antarctic ice.
A solo sailor left Greenland this week to do what no one could until the ice began to fail: circle the whole Arctic Ocean, alone and nonstop, in one season. He calls the voyage itself the experiment — a 10,000-mile measure of how much ice is gone, at a fraction of the cost of vanishing science.
Anthropic has asked the world to slow down before machines learn to build their own successors. The request is more honest than its critics allow — and less likely to work than its authors hope. I have watched this arithmetic play out before, on water.
The Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak in eastern Congo has roughly doubled in a week. There is still no vaccine for this strain, and contact tracing is running at half of what it needs to be.
A coral reef the size of Vatican City. Twenty-eight new species. A cold seep, a whale fall, a phantom jellyfish. All discovered off the Argentine coast on a single expedition. Eighty percent of the world's ocean remains unmapped.
A glacier on the Antarctic Peninsula collapsed faster than any modern observation has recorded. Scientists now know the mechanism. Whether the climate models that predict the future of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet account for it is a different question.
Three weeks after the World Health Organization declared a public health emergency, the Bundibugyo-strain Ebola outbreak in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo and Uganda has surpassed 360 confirmed cases and continues to grow. There is no approved vaccine for this strain of the virus.
A new pill has doubled survival in one of medicine's hardest cancers. It will save lives. It will also generate tens of billions of dollars — and for at least a decade, it will save those lives selectively, by ability to pay.
Bikini Atoll, in the northern Marshall Islands, was the site of 23 nuclear weapons tests conducted by the United States between 1946 and 1958. The Bikinian population — approximately 167 people
The world’s second-deepest trench is not empty. Six kilometres down, life persists — and a Pacific sleeper shark made a recent expedition’s lowered camera into a meal.