The AtlanticScience What Ballooning Carbon Emissions Will Do to TreesThe Atlantic - Daniel GrossmanMany forecasts for climate change assume that tropical forests will continue to soak up carbon dioxide as the world warms. What if they don’t? Apart from the experts, few people realize that climate change
The AtlanticScience A Hitch at NASA HeadquartersThe Atlantic - Marina KorenNASA has carried out its first all-female spacewalk, but hints of outdated thinking about women in space remain. Two astronauts spent their workday floating in outer space, their spacesuits tethered to
The AtlanticScience A Hidden World of Strange Starfish-Like Creatures in the AbyssThe Atlantic - Ed YongIt has only now come to light, and could be destroyed if deep-sea mining is allowed to go ahead. Earlier this year, a Belgian company planned to drop a giant underwater Roomba from the side of a ship,
The AtlanticWater The Mystery of Moon WaterThe Atlantic - Marina KorenThe lunar supply won’t be anything like the stuff on Earth, but NASA wants it anyway. The impact sent a plume of lunar material from the moon’s south pole flying out into space. For a few minutes, the
The AtlanticThomas Edison Thomas Edison’s Greatest InventionThe Atlantic - Derek ThompsonIt wasn’t the light bulb or the phonograph or the moving picture—or anything tangible. It was a way of thinking about technology. Thomas Alva Edison listened with his teeth. The inventor of the phonograph
The AtlanticAnthropocene What Made Me Reconsider the AnthropoceneThe Atlantic - Peter BrannenWhether our civilization is transient or not, its effects on the living world will last forever. Looming over the new food court of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History is one of those creatures
The AtlanticScience Cows Need Friends to Be HappyThe Atlantic - Rebecca GiggsA cow is a beast bred for uniformity. Whether black-and-white Holsteins or ginger-colored Jerseys, the marvel of the herd is that such unvaried selfsameness has been coaxed, over time, out of bovine diversity.
The AtlanticPhysiology It’s Possible to Inherit More DNA From One Parent Than the OtherThe Atlantic - Sarah Zhang23andMe’s 4-million-person database reveals how many people are living with undetected chromosomal anomalies. Before Natalie Nakles was born, before the egg from which she was conceived was even fully
The AtlanticClimate This Is What Adapting to Climate Change Looks LikeThe Atlantic - Robinson MeyerPG&E’s blackouts in California are a bleak preview of the disruptions that will become routine in a warmer world. California has always promised Americans a glimpse of the future. But this week, the Golden
The AtlanticChristina Koch The Exquisite Boredom of SpacewalkingThe Atlantic - Marina KorenA trip outside the International Space Station is, at its core, a home-improvement project. Ask astronauts what spacewalking around the International Space Station is like, and they get a dreamy look their
The AtlanticScience The Science of Getting Over ItThe Atlantic - Ben HealyDespite our commitment to 24/7 news, unlimited-data plans, and bottomless mimosas, nothing lasts forever. So how should we handle life’s endings and last hurrahs? Should we rage against the dying of the
The AtlanticScience A Dazzling Quarter Century of Exoplanet DiscoveryThe Atlantic - Marina KorenThe next time the Nobel Prize recognizes exoplanet science, it could be for the detection of signs of life on another world. A pair of astrophysicists have won a Nobel Prize for discovering something is
The AtlanticScience A Lesson for Ravens: Don’t Eat the TortoisesThe Atlantic - Thom van DoorenCan fake tortoise shells teach predators to stop devouring soft-shelled juveniles? Tim Shields didn’t see any young tortoises himself. For the most part, the only sign of them was their shells, desiccated
The AtlanticClimate Five Radical Climate Policies That Most Americans Actually LikeThe Atlantic - Robinson MeyerMost registered voters are in favor of spending trillions on weatherized buildings and renewable-energy infrastructure. For the first time in years—and maybe ever—Democrats are getting ambitious about
The AtlanticGEDmatch The Messy Consequences of the Golden State Killer CaseThe Atlantic - Sarah ZhangTools meant to reunite families are now being “used essentially to get families to put their members in jail.” This summer should have been a triumphant time for genealogy and forensics. It marked a year
The AtlanticScience Tree-Poaching Is On the RiseThe Atlantic - Elyse KellyA small group of people goes into the woods with a chain saw. That's how it begins. It ends with the death of a tree—felled, illegally, by poachers. The United States Forest Service estimates that as as
The AtlanticScience NASA Hands Elon Musk a Reality CheckThe Atlantic - Marina KorenA shared effort to deliver NASA astronauts to space recently got a little awkward. This was supposed to be the year. After nearly a decade of planning, NASA astronauts would fly to space on launch systems
The AtlanticSpaceX SpaceX Has Starry-Eyed Ambitions for Its StarshipThe Atlantic - Marina KorenElon Musk has laid out an ambitious future for his spaceship project, the effort to deliver people to the moon and Mars. The weeks of anticipation and breathless guesses from fans and critics. Onstage,
The AtlanticScience The Satellites Were Never Supposed to LaunchThe Atlantic - Marina KorenTwo years after illegally launching tiny satellites into orbit, a start-up is trying to convince regulators it’s going to play by the rules. Sara Spangelo keeps the satellite inside a small case, nestled
The AtlanticClimate The Oceans We Know Won’t Survive Climate ChangeThe Atlantic - Robinson MeyerSea-level rise will become unmanageable, and life will flee the world’s tropical oceans, if carbon pollution keeps rising, a new report from the UN climate panel says. Today a baby girl was born. Consider
The AtlanticScience The Dark Side of LightThe Atlantic - Rebecca BoyleBeneath the surface of one of Germany’s deepest lakes, researchers are studying the hidden effects of artificial light. NEUGLOBSOW, GERMANY—Martina Bauchrowitz put her back into it, swinging the oars a
The AtlanticGreta Thunberg Why Greta Makes Adults UncomfortableThe Atlantic - Robinson MeyerEspecially in private, she sounds a lot like … a teenager. In a very short time, Greta Thunberg—with her searing stare, Pippi Longstocking braids, and hand-painted sign reading SKOLSTREJK FÖR KLIMATET—has
The AtlanticScience The Milky Way Has Giant Bubbles at Its CenterThe Atlantic - Marina KorenAstronomers have found radio-emitting structures jutting out from our galaxy’s black hole. Farhad Yusef-Zadeh was observing the center of the Milky Way galaxy in radio waves, looking for the presence faint
The AtlanticAlcohol The Real Danger of Booze-Making Gut BacteriaThe Atlantic - Ed YongMicrobes can produce so much alcohol that people become drunk—and sustain liver damage—without touching any booze. The man’s troubles began in 2004, when, having moved from China to attend college in he
The Atlantic The Quiet Disappearance of Birds in North AmericaThe Atlantic - Ed YongThough the continent has 3 billion fewer birds than it did in 1970, those losses are hard to glean because it’s the commonest species that have been hit hardest. In the early afternoon of September 1,
The AtlanticComets ‘This Is Clearly Coming From Outside the Solar System’The Atlantic - Marina KorenThe second known visitor to our cosmic neighborhood from another star is making quite an entrance. No one knows where it came from, but it’s here now. And the chase is on. Astronomers around the world
The AtlanticScience How Ancient DNA Can Help Recast Colonial HistoryThe Atlantic - Ed YongThe people of pre-colonial Puerto Rico did not disappear entirely—a new study shows that the island’s residents still carry bits of their DNA. In the 15th century, when Europeans first reached the island
The Atlantic The Rat Apocalypse in New ZealandThe Atlantic - Catherine Spangler, Sophia Myszkowski, and Caitlin CadieuxNew Zealand has a rat problem. The non-native rodent, which originally hitched a ride to the island on ships in the 13th century, has proliferated to such an extent that it is now partially responsible
The AtlanticThe Arctic The Power of Fear in the Thawing ArcticThe Atlantic - Bathsheba DemuthLiving north of the Arctic Circle meant learning fear and its power to motivate in the face of danger—whether from a bear or climate change. How long did I walk in the footsteps of the bear? It was a day,
