Some 425 million years ago, leggy creatures called myriapods crawled onto land and never looked back. Today, the 13,000 species of centipedes, millipedes and other living myriapods (from the Greek words for “countless” and “legs”) are found in nearly every terrestrial environment on Earth, including caves, houses and the leaf-strewn grounds of Central Park. Some…
Realism, contrary to appearances, isn’t a form closed off to horror. The stories in ’Pemi Aguda’s debut collection, Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 US National Book award, rivetingly bore out this fact. Neither strictly realistic nor wholly supernatural, they seized on ordinary events pulsing with sinister possibility: a mother distraught at her inability to…
Mammals once shared the planet with dinosaurs until a catastrophic event 66 million years ago wiped out about 75% of all life on Earth. Even so, some species managed to survive. Among them were small, rodent-like mammals belonging to the genus Cimolodon. These animals were part of the multituberculates, a long-lived group that first appeared…
I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and bored. And one of the things you did with boredom at that time was drop some acid…
NASA follows international guidelines called the Planetary Protection protocol, aimed at making sure Earth’s biology doesn’t taint celestial bodies, and vice versa. The agency also has a dedicated team, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s biotechnology and planetary protection group, or B.P.P.G., that oversees efforts to avoid cross-contamination on missions. Several scientists behind the new research, including…
House Republicans had big plans for Earth Day this year: They would pass a bill to narrow protections for endangered species that they had long seen as federal overreach. It didn’t work out that way. On Wednesday afternoon, Republican leaders suddenly canceled a vote on the measure after an initial procedural vote showed shaky support…
On a January morning in 1969, an oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara blew out. Over three million gallons of crude oil spread across swathes of California coastline, darkening beaches and killing marine life. It was the largest oil spill the United States had ever seen. This catastrophe galvanised an environmental movement already…
It seems as though stars have been shooting across the heavens far more than usual lately. In March, fireball after fireball coursed through the skies of North America and Europe. Some of the dazzling apparitions dropped meteorites in their wake. In Ohio, space shards set down in fields and forests. Other rocky visitors smashed through…
Our universe might be chock-full of cosmic wonder, but you can observe only a fraction of astronomical phenomena with the naked eye. Meteor showers, natural fireworks that streak brightly across the night sky, are one of them. The latest observable meteor shower will be the Lyrids, which has been active since April 14 and is…
As astronaut Victor Glover made his way to the moon earlier this month on NASA’s Artemis II mission, he reflected on the incredible miracle that is planet Earth. “You are special,” Glover told an interviewer. Space, he said, “is a whole bunch of nothing.” But in the midst all that nothing, Glover could see a…
