EarthDate

Ernest Hemingway made Mount Kilimanjaro famous with his story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”—though he never climbed the peak.But many others have. More than 30,000 try each year, with two-thirds reaching the top.Kili, as it’s called, is the tallest mountain in Africa but the easiest climb of the Seven Summits—the highest peaks on the seven continents.Its high camps have hosted some world record sporting events, including the highest professional soccer game, with players hailing from 20 countries.It’s a unique ascent, traversing five different ecological zones, from cultivated lands to rain forest, then moorland, alpine desert and finally an arctic summit.The summit of Mount Kilimanjaro is actually three volcanic cones. The last major eruption ended 170,000 years ago, and all peaks are thought to be either extinct or dormant.There are glaciers in the highest areas, but they’re disappearing quickly, down more than 80 percent since the early 1900’s. It’s thought this is mostly related to human deforestation in the valleys surrounding the mountain, disrupting its microclimate.The valleys have fertile volcanic soils and ample rainfall, producing the tallest trees in Africa. Tanzania has recently pushed to protect them from logging and is now replanting millions of indigenous trees in an effort to reforest the area.Through careful stewardship, the mountain could be protected from the further impacts of humans.

Why do zebras have stripes? It’s probably a combination of things.Zebras’ main predators are lions. Black and white stripes actually make zebras stand out against their grassland home, rather than camouflage them.But when many zebras are running simultaneously, the cacophony of stripes may confuse predators as to how many zebras there are and which way they’re moving, making it more difficult to target an individual.However, lions are ultimately successful at catching zebras, so this optical confusion deters but doesn’t prevent predation.It’s also thought that the alternating black and white areas may be a thermoregulation strategy. The black stripes are 20 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in the sun, which may help the zebra absorb the sun’s heat on cool mornings, while white stripes reflect heat in the hot afternoons.But perhaps the most beneficial quality of the stripes is to deter biting flies. Researchers have found that the stripes confuse the flies’ depth perception, making it difficult for them to land and bite.In tests, scientists dressed horses in striped coats and put them with captive zebras and solid-colored horses in fly-infested areas.They found that flies preferred the solid-colored animals four to one, and either hovered over, or bounced off, the striped animals.Scientists accept it’s probably some combination of all these beneficial traits that led the zebra to develop stripes.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake may seem like a wasteland, ringed by toxic deposits of mercury and arsenic, and filled with water so salty that only brine shrimp can live in it.However, those shrimp feed 10 million migrating birds. And the lake provides eight thousand jobs and two billion dollars in industry, harvesting salt and other minerals. It’s vital to the region’s ecology and economy.But the lake is in danger.Great Salt Lake is the remnant of Lake Bonneville which, in ancient times, was nearly as big as Lake Michigan.Then, 18,000 years ago, the lake found a drainage path to the Pacific Ocean through the Snake River Valley, and its level fell 400 feet.Fifteen thousand years ago, as glaciers retreated from the region, the climate became drier. The lake became landlocked again and started to evaporate, falling another 600 feet to stabilize at its modern size.But over the past century, its been gradually shrinking. In 2022, it hit a record low.This is due to rising temperatures and drier summers in the region, and, importantly, to lower inflow—as the rivers that feed the lake have been increasingly diverted for agriculture and mining. So, Utah began water conservation measures.Then 2023 saw the most snowfall in 70 years, which may lead to record runoff.Only time will tell if Utah’s people, and weather, can save the Great Salt Lake.

The megalodon, Earth’s largest shark, is thankfully...extinct.It was twice the length of a school bus. Larger than most of today’s whales and three times the size of the biggest great white shark—with up to 10 times the bite force.Its jaws were filled with hundreds of six-inch teeth, which fell out and were replaced every few weeks. The megalodon’s large range meant that fossilized teeth have been found around the world.This fearsome giant prowled Earth’s oceans for 20 million years—and an animal that size required a great deal of food.Megalodon teeth have been found embedded in fossilized whale bones, and teeth gashes are visible in their petrified vertebrae. But it also could have eaten dolphins, large fish, other sharks...pretty much whatever it wanted.Then, around 3 million years ago, Earth’s climate and oceans cooled. This killed off a third of most marine animals, especially localized species at the base of the food web.In turn, that may have restricted the megalodon to a smaller range of warmer tropical waters, where prey continued to thrive.Researchers believe that megalodon gave birth to their six-foot young in shallow coastal areas. As Earth’s water froze into continental glaciers, sea level fell and many of these areas would have disappeared.We’ll never know exactly what wiped out this mighty species. But there are plenty of modern ocean creatures that are probably happy it’s gone!

Have you ever seen the brilliant hues of petrified wood and wondered how it gets its colors?When trees die, they typically fall to the forest floor, where they decay.But if they fall in a place without oxygen—in water, a swamp or bog, or are buried by volcanic ash or flood silt—they may not decay.After thousands or millions of years, water seeps into the pores of the wood, carrying dissolved silica. The silica bonds with the cellulose and replaces it. Then other mineralized water enters the silica–cellulose framework, where those compounds replace the rest of the organic material.We’ve found nearly 40 minerals in petrified wood, many containing iron, manganese and chromium, which provide its spectacular red, orange and blue colors.The lithification process also preserves the physical structure of the tree, sometimes down to the microscopic level.Eventually, erosion exposes the fossilized logs—some dating back over 300 million years for us to discover...And they’ve helped us study the long history of tree evolution while providing valuable information about the environmental conditions of the ancient past, such as rainfall, drought, fire and insect populations.Petrified Forest National Park in northeastern Arizona is one of the most famous sites. Definitely worth a trip, especially in the spring or fall when temperatures are mild, to find beautifully colored windows into the past.

When a thunderstorm forms over the desert, it may not produce rain—but could form a deadly dust blizzard called a haboob.When rain droplets condense within a thunderhead, they cool the air, which rushes toward Earth with the rain.If this happens over a desert, the rain will often evaporate before reaching Earth. The evaporative cooling further chills the air, which falls faster.Eventually the current of air strikes the ground, at high speed, and expands outward.The blast often carries dust and sand into the air, to form a huge dust storm that advances in front of the thunderhead.These were first studied in the Sahara, hence were given an Arabic name, haboob. But they form across arid regions of the U.S. as well.Sand, dust and soil carried by a haboob can sandblast vehicles and buildings. Worse, haboobs often carry bacteria and viruses from the desert floor, causing respiratory problems and skin irritation for those exposed to them.Even more dangerous, haboobs can suddenly drop visibility to zero. Highway pileups are common in these storms, and the dust can blind pilots and interfere with airplane engines.If areas like the American West become drier, we could see more frequent haboobs.If you’re caught in one, first cover your nose and mouth. If driving, honk your horn and pull far off the road. Then turn off all your lights so other cars don’t steer toward and hit you.

So-called water spiders aren’t spiders at all but insects specially evolved to walk on water. There are 1,700 species of these water striders, which have existed on Earth for millions of years. If you’ve ever wondered how they skate so effortlessly across a pond without falling in, the answer is surface tension—and their very specific adaptation to it.Water molecules, as we’ve discussed on prior EarthDates, bond together tightly, especially where water meets air. This creates a membrane-like surface that the water skaters take advantage of.Their long legs are useless on land. But they’re equipped with thousands of microscopic hairs that trap air in nanogrooves. The air repels water, keeping the surface tension intact though the insect is moving across it.And move they do, at up to 100 body lengths a second—the equivalent of a human traveling at 400 miles an hour. They use their incredible speed to catch prey that also live in this unique environment: other insects, small spiders, and, their favorite food, mosquito larvae.This makes water striders a beneficial insect in controlling mosquito populations.In ideal conditions, water skaters can live up to a year, hatching new eggs every two weeks. And when their ponds are drying up, they’re able to spawn a new generation with wings, to fly off to find another pond to skate on. 

At the bottom of the ocean lies a treasure. But recovering it could be technically difficult, geopolitically challenging, and environmentally damaging.Eighty three percent of the ocean is a mile deep, or much more, making the deep ocean the largest environment on Earth, covering 115 million square miles.Down there, like in the Amazon, species diversity is high. There may be thousands of species we have not yet identified.Down there, also, are polymetallic nodules and crusts, formed of iron and manganese, and in smaller amounts, cobalt, lithium, molybdenum, rare earth elements and other valuable metals that precipitate out of seawater, very slowly, over millions of years.Many of these metals are used in new energy technologies, like batteries, so companies and countries are considering recovering them. But it’s complicated.Most of the deep ocean is in international waters. No one’s quite sure how to regulate or share revenue from mining there.And the deep ocean is a poorly understood environment. Mining could kill many creatures and damage seafloor ecosystems.So far, no permits have been issued. But there is pressure on international authorities to do so, as today’s supplies of many of these materials are limited.Efforts to mine the deep ocean, responsibly and sustainably, may be an area of dispute—and opportunity—in the future.

Giraffes are fascinating animals. They have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as humans do—seven—but each one is nearly a foot long.They have long, purple tongues too—nearly two feet—that can grasp things as easily as a monkey’s tail can, which they use to pull leaves and fruits from high branches.All four giraffe species are covered in spots. And each individual’s spots are as unique as a fingerprint.But the most fascinating thing about giraffes...is their cardiovascular system.Their head is so high up that to deliver normal blood pressure to their brain they must generate twice normal pressure at their heart. Enough blood pressure to kill a person.They do that with a heart that’s two feet long and weighs up to 25 pounds.They also have specialized one-way arteries. When a giraffe tilts its neck down, valves in its jugular close, storing up to a liter of blood, to keep it from flooding the brain.When the giraffe lifts it head back up, the blood rushes out of the jugular back to the heart, pressurizing it so it can pump blood all the way back up the neck to the brain.Arteries in the legs constrict to stop blood from pooling in the feet, and special connective tissue acts as natural compression socks.The giraffe’s miraculous blood pressure control system is still not well understood by scientists. But they’re studying it to see if it might one day help humans manage our own high blood pressure.

Hail is created when rain starts falling up.This usually happens in the spring, in middle latitudes, when tall clouds form over warm updrafts.In the cold upper reaches of the cloud, water condenses around nuclei, like dust particles, dirt, or salt crystals, to form droplets of rain that begin to fall to Earth...but then are pushed back upwards by the updraft.The rain droplets tumble within the cold center of the cloud, falling down and being pushed back up repeatedly, where they collide with other droplets and begin to freeze, turning into tiny hailstones.More water droplets and water vapor freeze around them, and the hail grows in size and weight.If the updraft is strong, the hail will continue to be suspended in the middle of the cloud, growing until it’s too heavy to stay aloft. When the hailstones do fall, they can be destructive.Small hail weighs less than an ounce. But even that can cause billions of dollars in damage, pummeling crops, denting cars, and destroying roofs.However, hail as large as a softball has been reported, falling at more than 100 miles an hour. Giant hailstones like this have occasionally even killed people.So, if you see hail larger than golf balls falling, take shelter underground, or inside a building away from windows, which can break.Because, while a little water never hurt anyone, it can be dangerous as hail.

When you watch waves crash on the beach, you’re seeing the visible end result of many invisible forces.Waves are formed near or very far from shore, usually by wind—the first invisible force.As wind blows over the sea, surface friction transfers its energy to the water. How fast, how far, and for how long the wind blows determines how much waves grow.When the wind stops blowing, the waves stop growing—but they don’t stop traveling.A wave is not actually water traveling but instead another invisible force: energy traveling through the water. When a wave passes, water molecules lurch forward then back, coming to rest in nearly the same place. But that movement transfers energy to the next water molecule...and so on.Uninterrupted, this wave energy can travel thousands of miles through open ocean, sometimes for more than a week, before finally reaching a shoreline.As the water grows shallower, another invisible force comes into play: friction against the ocean bottom, which slows the base of the wave.But the top of the wave keeps moving at its original speed, eventually crashing forward over the wave base. The shape of that wave break is determined by the unseen topography below it.In some places, deep undersea canyons channel and concentrate wave energy as it reaches shore, to form some of the largest waves in the world.Spectacular sights, formed out of sight.

The gleaming White Cliffs of Dover have dark seams of flint within them that were the target of some of Britain’s first mines—more than six thousand years ago.The white cliffs are made of nearly pure chalk, the remains of phytoplankton, tiny floating algae.These phytoplankton lived here in warm Cretaceous seas. When they died, their spherical bodies fell apart into the hard plates that covered them.The microscopic plates, made of calcium carbonate, sank to the seafloor. There they formed a layer of white mud, at a rate of just half a millimeter per year.But over 30 million years, that white sediment layer reached nearly two thousand feet thick. Its weight compacted it into the chalk we see today.The main consumers of these floating algae were radiolarians, tiny zooplankton whose bodies were made not of calcium but silica.Once they died, and were compacted for millions of years, the silica in their remains formed layers of flint in the chalk.Though flint is a form of quartz, it’s nearly as hard as a diamond. It can be chipped to have very sharp edges, which Stone Age humans used to make blades and hunting points.It was so valuable that Neolithic tribes would dig mine shafts down through the soft chalk to reach a strip of flint, then bring it to the surface to work into tools.These mine shafts, and the tool making sites around them, may be Britain’s earliest industry and one of the reasons that human population grew here.

Since the peak of the last Ice Age, Earth’s ice has been melting, and sea level has risen nearly 400 feet! But only recently do we have the technology to carefully measure it.For the last 20 years, a network of satellites and nearly 4,000 robotic floats have been measuring temperature and surface elevation of the global oceans.They’ve found that the surface of the ocean has warmed an average of 1 degree Fahrenheit in that time, and average global sea level has risen 3.5 inches.While this is within the normal rate of sea level rise for the past 8,000 years, we can now better understand what’s happening:Warming seas have contributed to the melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and glaciers in Greenland. Their meltwater is responsible for about 2.3 inches of that sea level rise.But the other 1.2 inches comes from a property of water itself. Water expands as it warms because molecules bump up against each other more frequently, causing an increase in volume.Meaning that, as oceans have warmed, they’ve swollen in their basins and slowly crept onto the land.Oceans act as heat sinks to moderate global temperatures swings, and researchers estimate they have absorbed 90 percent of the warming that Earth has experienced over these past 20 years.As our planet and oceans continue to warm, there will be more sea level rise, not just from more meltwater, but further swelling of the sea.

Beavers are amazing rodents.They have long teeth that never stop growing; they control their length by gnawing on wood.They have fat-insulated bodies, webbed feet, and a large flat tail—which make them clumsy and exposed on land but quick and graceful in the water.Most importantly, beavers cut down trees to dam streams and rivers to make their homes. To many humans, these activities seem destructive.But the ponds and wetlands they create are essential for hundreds of other species that have coevolved with beavers over the last 10 million years.These include fish and insects, water birds, amphibians and reptiles, large grazing animals, and a multitude of plant species.Beaver ponds and wetlands provide food, water and shelter for many of these species—and create huge benefits for the forest:The ponds protect the woods from fires. Their surface water slowly drains into and recharges the water table. They filter out particulates to purify streams. They slow the progress of, and can even stop, floods. And serve as water repositories in times of drought.A century ago, trappers had hunted beavers nearly to extinction, for their furs. But around 1900, laws were enacted to protect them, and their population has since rebounded.Thankfully, beavers now occupy nearly all of their previous range, shaping and improving the landscape from Canada all the way down to northern Mexico.

Carlsbad Caverns National Park is a very rare place.Its main room is the largest cave chamber in North America, covering more than eight acres. And its cave formations are unsurpassed anywhere.It’s also rare because it was created not by carbonic acid percolating down through the soil but by sulfuric acid coming up from below.Around 20 million years ago, hydrogen sulfide gas began to migrate underground from oil deposits in the Permian Basin of Texas, toward the exposed fossilized reefs near what is now Carlsbad, New Mexico.There, the hydrogen sulfide gas rose to meet the water table. It combined with oxygen to create sulfuric acid and began to dissolve the limestone that forms the Permian reef.Over the ages, as the water table rose and fell, the sulfuric acid worked on shallower and deeper layers, creating hundreds of caverns, some thousands of feet below ground.Around a million years ago, erosion connected the caves to the surface. Mineral-enriched water began to trickle in and, drop by drop, over millennia, formed spectacular crystal formations of calcite, aragonite, and gypsum.Seven thousand five hundred years ago the area began to dry up and the cave formations stopped growing.But they’re preserved there today in all their glory—waiting for you to make the trip to Carlsbad Caverns, to see some of the most stunning geology in the world.

When dinosaurs were first discovered, scientists thought they must have been cold-blooded like the lizards they resembled.Later, they realized that some dinosaurs are related to modern birds—which have the highest metabolic rate in the animal kingdom. Could dinosaurs, too, have been warm-blooded?New research reveals the answer is: both.So-called “cold-blooded” creatures, or ectotherms, are confined mostly to mild climates. They’re more sedentary but require less food and oxygen to survive.Warm-blooded creatures, or endotherms, can thrive in and migrate to diverse climates—but expend much more energy to maintain constant body temperatures.All creatures take in oxygen, and new research shows that the waste products of processing that oxygen—different in warm- and cold-blooded animals—are durable enough to be found in fossils.Molecular analysis of dinosaur fossils suggests an evolutionary break, with cold-blooded, slow-moving herbivores, like Stegosaurus, on one branch, and warm-blooded, highly mobile predators, like Velociraptors, on another.Larger dinosaurs like Brontosaurus and Tyrannosaurus also had high metabolic rates, but not as high as the ravenous Velociraptors.These findings indicate that dinosaurs evolved different metabolisms and body temperatures for different environmental niches—just as today’s animals have.

In the 1700’s, there was no standard of measurement.Every village had its own unit. By some estimates, there were 250,000 different units in France alone.This made commerce and mapmaking so difficult that the French government created a special bureau to standardize things.And they decided to create the meter—which they defined as one ten-millionth the distance from the equator to the North Pole. The problem was they had no way to measure that.So, they made a painstaking, seven-year-long survey of the exact distance between Dunkirk and Barcelona and used the latitudes of those two cities to calculate the distance from equator to pole—which took another year.They divided that appropriately, then cast a platinum bar of that exact length, to create the meter standard. Thirty copies were sent around the world as the basis for the metric system.The bureau created a system of prefixes to denote multiples and divisions of the meter. A thousand meters is a kilometer. One-thousandth of a meter is a millimeter.Modern computers, telescopes and microscopes have required ever larger, and smaller, increments—we’re now up to quettameters, which is a thousand times the diameter of the universe!As our scientific instruments get ever more capable, we’ll need more terms for an ever expanding, and shrinking, metric system.

Cacti are native to the Americas and first evolved 30 million years ago—which sounds like a long time—but they’re hundreds of millions of years younger than most other types of plants.They’re specially adapted to dry environments, having transformed their trunks into thick, green, water-storing tissue and their leaves into spines.Cacti grow from half an inch to more than 60 feet in height and range from Patagonia to Canada.They draw in CO2 at night to fuel photosynthesis during the day, then close their pores as temperatures rise to avoid evaporation.Perhaps the most iconic cactus is the giant saguaro. It’s become a symbol of the American West but grows mainly in Arizona. And very slowly.It takes 10 years to reach an inch tall. Seventy to reach six feet. By the time it’s 200, it has reached its full height of 40 plus feet.Along with a tap root to hold it up, saguaros, like most cacti, have a broad shallow root system, just a few inches below the surface. An adult saguaro can use this to suck up 200 gallons of water during a single desert rain storm.That might make them sound like a good water source, but cacti produce acids and alkaloids to protect themselves; drinking their stored water can make you sick.The fruits of all cacti, however, are edible. But most are prickly, and many taste bad. The cactus has evolved to be as tough as its environment.

There’s a place in Siberia that the locals call “The Gateway to Hell.”Technically, it’s a retrogressive thaw megaslump. In plain English, a crater melted into the permafrost. In fact, it’s the largest permafrost melt in the world.It began 60 years ago, when the Russians clear-cut a strip of Siberian forest. This exposed the soil to the summer sun, which began to melt a crater that’s now a half mile wide and 300 feet deep—and still growing.This is important for two reasons.First, the crater has exposed 650,000 years of previously hidden sediment.In winter, when the soil is frozen and stable, scientists can enter the crater to recover specimens of extinct animals and to study how cycles of forestation and changing climate have impacted the area over millennia.Second, in summer, when the permafrost is melting, scientists are able to measure the air above the crater.As the organic material thaws, it’s consumed by microbes, which produce CO2 and methane. The crater produces both of these greenhouse gases at twice the rate of the surrounding area.Forest fires have exposed other areas of Siberian soil to the sun. And summer temperatures are rising. Both are melting more permafrost.The Gateway to Hell provides scientists a laboratory to study that melting, to see how it may affect the local landscape, and global climate, in the future.

Easter Island has little to do with Easter—but new research shows it did once have a very impressive egg hunt.More than a thousand years ago, Polynesians crossed thousands of miles of ocean to reach one of the most remote islands on the planet. They called it Rapa Nui and built a community there.Three hundred years ago, a Dutch captain arrived on Easter day and gave the island its Western name.Little did he know that, for centuries, the Rapa Nuans had worshipped migrating birds for their freedom to fly away to distant lands—and had practiced an important and sometimes deadly ceremony each year, upon the arrival of the sooty terns.Young, fit Rapa Nuans would swim the shark-infested waters to Motu Nui, a rocky islet where the terns nested, to harvest an egg. They’d put it in a special headband carrier, then swim the watery gauntlet back to Rapa Nui, where they would climb a thousand-foot sea cliff, careful with every foot- and handhold not to break the egg.The first egg hunter to arrive at the top, with his prize intact, would present it to an important elder in his village, who would be crowned Tangata-Manu, the bird man. His tribe would rule Rapa Nui for the next year.Later, upon the bird man’s death, the islanders would carve a moai, one of their famous mega-statues, in his image.This makes our Easter egg hunts look, well, like child’s play.

Spring is tornado season, so let’s take a look at a few twister myths and how the truth about them can keep you safe.The first myth is that spring is tornado season! While it’s true more than half of those in the Northern Hemisphere do occur in April and May, they can occur in any month of the year.It’s also a myth that tornadoes never strike the same place twice. Some places have had three in one day. Others have had one on the same day in three consecutive years.It’s a myth that tornadoes won’t cross bodies of water or form in mountains or cities. While that’s less likely, they’ve hit several urban areas in the southern U.S. and jumped over the Mississippi River.It’s a myth that you can outdrive a tornado in your car. Tornadoes can travel 60 miles an hour or more and move unpredictably. Your car could be picked up by one of them.Parking under a bridge or overpass could actually be more dangerous because those structures can channel and intensify the wind and debris.If a tornado is coming toward your car, the safest thing to do is get out, move away and find shelter in a ditch, or lying face down in a flat field.Another myth is that air pressure will explode a house’s windows outward. It’s actually flying debris carried by the wind that’s the most dangerous part of a twister—and that’s what breaks windows.So don’t worry about opening them; that’s precious time you could use taking shelter.You can find more tips to stay safe during a tornado on EarthDate.

Some paleontologists have recently put forth a controversial idea—that they’ve found a place where the time of year the dinosaurs died is captured precisely in the fossil record.It’s called Tanis, in North Dakota. But it was once the northern end of an inland sea.66 million years ago, when the Chicxulub asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula, it instantly wiped out all life within 1,000 miles. But Tanis is nearly 2,000 miles away—what happened here?Glass spherules, made of quartz, rained down from the heated atmosphere.Shock waves from the huge earthquake caused by the asteroid sloshed the inland sea, in waves up to 30 feet high.Fish died with spherules caught in their gills. Schools of them were found preserved in rocks, with open mouths suggesting death by suffocation.Their bony plates show they had just begun the rapid growth of spring but had not reached the maximum growth of summer.Other animals and plants were buried upright, frozen in place, not flattened like typical fossils.If the scientists are right, this pegs the asteroid impact to a spring day in the Northern Hemisphere, which would have made its animals and plants more vulnerable than those in the Southern Hemisphere, where they could have already begun winter hibernation.More fascinating clues in our quest to understand the event that made way for mammals, like us, to inhabit the Earth.

For more than 20,000 years, humans have used poison—in hunting, in pest and plant control, and even to kill other humans.Castor bean residue is the source for ricin, which causes multiple organ failure. But it’s used by some indigenous tribes on their hunting arrows.But the deadliest synthetic poison is VX, a nerve agent that stops victims' breathing. Originally developed as an insecticide, it proved too lethal for that. One gram could kill 2,500 people.Another profoundly lethal poison is the radioactive isotope of polonium, famously used to assassinate a Russian dissident in 2006. One gram could kill 10 million people.The most deadly one, surprisingly, is used routinely. Extremely tiny quantities of botulinum toxin, produced by bacteria, are used to paralyze facial muscles to reduce wrinkles. But just one gram could kill one billion people!All these may be deadly, but the riskiest poisons are the ones found at home—cabinets full of pesticides, cleaning solutions and medications.There’s one poisoning reported in the U.S. every eight seconds, and 90 percent of them occur in households.Little kids tend to put things in their mouths, so they’re the most vulnerable. Nearly 4 percent of children below six will have a poison exposure.A good reason to put child locks on cabinets that contain potentially poisonous household chemicals.

Heavy farm equipment is now as heavy as the heaviest dinosaurs—and, surprisingly, there may be some similarities.Today, a fully loaded combine weighs 60,000 pounds—or more!Engineers have worked to distribute their increasing weight across the soil, widening the tires, sometimes putting three tires on each hub.But research has shown these heavier machines compact not just the tilled topsoil but soil far beneath it, into the root zones of crops.This heavy compaction can destroy soil structure: the pores of air space, fungi, insects, earthworms, and beneficial microbes that are essential to soil health and thriving plants. And this damage can persist for decades.Likewise, the heaviest dinosaurs, tromping through vegetated areas for millions of years, must have compacted those soils, hampering growth of the food they depended on.Scientists think their long necks may have been an adaptation to help them stay on established pathways and reach into untouched vegetation—much like elephants do today.We may never know, but modern farmers are looking for machinery solutions that don’t compact the soil as much. They probably won’t have long necks—but they probably will stick to defined paths.The most likely solution may be fleets of small robotic tractors, controlled remotely by one operator or autonomously, keeping to set patterns.The farms of the future, informed by the giants of the past.

Lobsters used to be considered the “cockroach of the sea,” food fit only for indentured servants and prisoners. My, how times have changed.Could the same change be coming for crickets?Today, nearly 40 percent of habitable land is used to raise livestock and their feed.By 2050, the UN projects global population will increase by two billion people—people who will need protein in their diet. There may not be enough real estate to produce today’s livestock for them.For the same amount of protein, farming insects requires 5 times less feed, 15 times less land and 50 times less water than beef—and produces 80 times less methane!Insects grow quickly, in days instead of months or years, produce huge numbers of offspring, and can be farmed vertically, like produce.In fact, raising insects may have less environmental impact than many crops!They can be fed organic waste. And their waste can then be used as fertilizer.And they’re good for you. Insects are rich in amino acids, vitamins and minerals. Flour made from ground crickets has more iron than spinach and more calcium than milk.The UN has catalogued 1,900 species of edible insects—and there are already two billion people who eat them: dried grasshoppers in Mexico, fried grubs in Africa, and roasted insects of all kinds in Asia.Once we get a taste for them, they may wriggle their way into many more diets.

You may have seen, years ago, commercials for cubic zirconia—a synthetic diamond substitute —and been unimpressed.But naturally occurring zircon crystals, made from zirconium silicate, are another story.Zircon crystals are extremely durable, resistant to melting, cracking, dissolving, or crushing, and able to withstand repeated cycles of metamorphism and erosion.This makes them the longest lasting—and oldest—minerals on Earth.If that’s not impressive enough, they also have a natural clock within them.Uranium atoms have the same charge as zirconium atoms so they’re able to sneak into zircon crystals in trace amounts.The uranium decays radioactively into lead over time, and the ratio of uranium to lead in a zircon crystal can precisely tell its age.Recently scientists found tiny zircon crystals from western Australia that were 4.38 billion years old.Bear in mind that Earth itself is about 4.5 billion years old, so these crystals hold important clues to its beginning.Analysis of oxygen isotopes within the crystals revealed they formed in a water-rich magma. Traces of titanium point to cooling at temperatures found in plate boundary subduction zones.These findings suggest that Earth had more water—and active plate tectonics—hundreds of millions of years earlier than currently thought.All that from a tiny, but very impressive, crystal.

Dung beetles. Scientists think they evolved 150 million years ago, along with flowering plants, which had become the main food of herbivorous dinosaurs.Much of the plant matter passed through the dinosaurs’ guts, producing huge volumes of poop with some nutritive value—for a new kind of beetle to capitalize on.Today, there are 8,000 species completely dependent on dung. They eat it, make homes of it, and lay their eggs in it so their hatchlings will have food.Some species live in the dung. Others tunnel under it, to pull it into their burrows. The most famous make big balls of it and roll them away for safe keeping.But first, they climb on top of the ball and do a little dance. Scientists think they’re taking a “photo” of the sky to orient themselves.They then push the ball off at top speed, to avoid it being stolen by another hungry dung beetle.If they get knocked off course, they climb back on the ball, reorient themselves to the sky, and carry on.They can orient to the sun, the moon, and when there are neither of these, even the Milky Way.Researchers have even put dung beetles in planetariums, and they’ve navigated just fine to the projected galaxy.But when they blindfolded the beetles, they couldn’t orient at all and just pushed their dung balls around in circles.Dung beetles’ chosen food, and their single-minded dedication to it, may seem funny to us. But like other nocturnal animals, from frogs to seals, they are amazing animal astronomers.

In the early 1800’s, Napoleon’s emissaries in Egypt discovered an ancient map.Records from the time showed it came from a tomb, in the village of Deir el-Medina, the traditional home of craftsmen who had worked on the temples of the pharaohs in ancient Egypt.Later studies revealed this particular map was drawn around 1150 BC, in the characteristic handwriting of Amennakhte, the official “Scribe-of-the-Tomb.” And it showed something marvelous.It recorded the geologic features of Wadi Hammamat, the “Valley of Many Baths,” and apparently was created for pharaoh Rameses the IV, to help plan mining expeditions to the area.This is because the wadi was the Egyptians’ sole source for bekhen-stone, the nearly black, fine-grained greywacke used for many of their greatest statues carved between 3000 BC and 400 AD, and still admired today.In the amazing map, Amennakhte had invented a graphical language to represent strata layers, rock types, topographic lines, faults and other features, very similar to geologic maps made today.In fact, modern scientists have returned to the wadi with his map to find that it pictures the area accurately enough to be used today.Just how significant was this? The next known geologic maps were drawn some three thousand years later.Amennakhte was clearly an Earth scientist way, way ahead of his time.

In the remote desert town of Coober Pedy, in South Australia, summer temperatures can reach 127 degrees—so hot that many residents live below ground, where the temperature is a constant 75 degrees.This tradition began 100 years ago when the first opals were discovered, and so was born an underground cottage mining industry that endures today.Only 5 percent of opals found worldwide are designated as precious, with a fiery play of color within them, and 95 percent of those come from Australia.Unlike other gemstones, opals are not minerals but instead made of microscopic spheres of quartz—silicon dioxide—that form very slowly in sediment layers at low temperature in the presence of water.Perhaps it’s not surprising then, that opals are 10 to 20 percent water.As they form, they may replace minerals in existing fossils. Some of the Coober Pedy opals inherit the fossil forms of ancient sea creatures.Here, the Australian government has discouraged large-scale mining by limiting prospectors to single claims.The result is more than 250,000 small mine shafts in the area, some of which have been converted into underground homes, hotels and businesses.To excavate a new home costs about the same as building one above ground. But the diggers may uncover more gemstones in the process, which helps to subsidize the cost of the home.Now that’s a valuable opal.

Yellowstone was the first national park in the world, designated by the U.S. government in 1872.Before then, it was travelled by explorers and fur trappers. And for 11,000 years before that was a hunting and camping ground for indigenous tribes.But perhaps the most fascinating part of its history occurred when it was formed.When you visit Yellowstone, you’re standing above a geologic hot spot in the Earth’s mantle.Two million years ago, this hot spot created supercharged lava, in magma chambers that eventually erupted, launching volcanic material all the way to the Mississippi River.The empty chambers then collapsed, forming the first Yellowstone Caldera, a 30-mile-wide shallow crater-basin.Two more volcanic eruptions happened, 1.3 million and 600,000 years ago, such that three overlapping calderas about 45 miles wide form the center of Yellowstone Park.Though the calderas have gradually filled with sediment, they’re still home to more than half of the world’s geysers and natural hot spring pools.Except for its remarkable hydrothermal activity, Yellowstone has been volcanically quiet for 70,000 years—and scientists don’t expect it to erupt again in our lifetimes. Some think it may never.Still, the park remains one of the most heavily instrumented and closely monitored sites in the world, a geologic wonder that amazes scientists—and millions of visitors each year.

Octopuses are incredible, almost otherworldly creatures. They can change their color, shape and texture in less than a tenth of a second—making them masters of camouflage.With no bones, they can squeeze their entire bodies through tiny openings—making them great escape artists.They’re highly intelligent and demonstrate short- and long-term memory. They learn to recognize people and have even been trained to operate a camera to take their picture.They play, use tools and solve problems. They can learn how to open containers and do puzzles. They’ve even been seen stealing aboard fishing boats to eat crabs from a trap.But this intelligence doesn’t work anything like ours—perhaps because they diverged from us evolutionarily more than 750 million years ago.They have about the same number of neurons as a dog, but they’re distributed. A third are in a central donut-shaped brain that encircles their esophagus. The other two-thirds are in ganglia in each of their arms. This allows their arms to “think” their moves independently.And all those neurons are processing a huge amount of sensory data from their environment.Each of their hundreds of suckers can have more taste buds than a human tongue. Their skin has special proteins that allow it to sense the color of the surfaces it touches.Imagine tasting with your fingers, seeing with your skin, and changing your shape and color to anything you want, and you can begin to appreciate the amazing octopus.

In January 2022, the largest volcanic eruption since Mount Pinatubo happened. And few people noticed.That’s because it occurred in the remote kingdom of Tonga, made up of tiny, sparsely inhabited islands in the South Pacific.But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t important. It produced the highest eruption cloud in modern times, and changed the way scientists view the interaction between volcanoes and the atmosphere.Here’s what happened: the volcano’s vent was 500 feet below sea level. As it erupted, the water column collapsed into it, where cool seawater met 2,000-degree-Fahrenheit magma and violently exploded into steam.This caused a self-perpetuating explosion: the steam would blow out the rock, tunneling farther down into the volcano. This exposed more magma, which vaporized more water, and tunneled farther down.By its end, the eruption had excavated 2,300 feet down, wiping out the entire volcano and two nearby uninhabited islands.It also created a water vapor cloud 36 miles that punched upward, into the high atmosphere.As the cloud cooled, it collapsed into the stratosphere, causing atmospheric shockwaves that circled the globe. These interacted with the ocean surface, forming fast-moving micro tsunamis, just a few inches tall, across the Pacific.Scientists will be studying data from Tonga for decades to come, to better understand both future and past eruptions.

Fjords are deep valleys with steep sides, formed by glaciers. They’re usually on the coasts of continents and filled with water.Over the past five million years, glaciers have migrated over continents then melted back, nearly 50 times.Modern fjords formed during the last glacial advance, from around 100,000 to 20,000 years ago, when glaciers covered a quarter of all land on Earth.Since so much water was locked up in glaciers, sea level was 400 feet lower than today. In the high latitudes, especially on the western edges of continents, prevailing winds brought moist sea air that fell as snow. Glaciers became so thick and heavy that they formed deep channels through rocky coastlines as they moved to the sea.In places, they cut valleys 3,500 feet deep down to sea level, then cut another 3,500 feet into the ocean floor. When the glaciers finally melted and retreated, they left valleys sometimes 7,000 feet deep, with more than half of that below sea level.This left the western coasts of Norway and Chile completely dissected by fjords. If you took a boat along Norway’s coastline, bypassing the fjords, you’d travel 1,600 miles. But if you sailed along the edge of land, slipping into and out of every one of its 1,200 fjords, it would be an incredible 18,000 miles. Here, and in places like New Zealand, fjords define the coastal character of the landscape.

The oldest individual trees are conifers—but they’re not the famous sequoias. Some of those exceed 3,000 years. But bristlecone pines are centuries, even millennia, older.They’ve adapted to small, high and dry ranges in eastern California, Nevada and Utah, just below the tree line.The oldest trees live in the harshest conditions, where few other plants can grow, so they’re less likely to be exposed to fire, insects or disease. And the oldest of them all was a tree named Methuselah.Bristlecone pines have unusual growing habits. They are extremely slow, adding only one inch of height per century.Their roots support only the part of the tree directly above them, so if some roots die only that part of the tree dies.The bristlecone then twists, very slowly, to face the dead part of the tree toward the wind, to take the brunt of the elements and protect the living part of the tree.The large areas of dead wood on the trees allowed scientists to sample the rings of Methuselah and found it was almost 4,800 years old. Centuries older than the pyramids of Egypt.Recently, an even more ancient bristlecone was found—at more than 5,000 years old.If a seed from one of these old-timers started growing today, we’d be ringing in the year 7023 before it’s as old.

A thousand years before the Inca, in the deserts of Peru where rainfall is almost nonexistent, lived a civilization so advanced they’d figured out how to use wind to pump water.The Nazca people were fantastic artists, famous among anthropologists and ancient art collectors for their textiles and ceramics. But they were also brilliant engineers.Over generations, they constructed a sophisticated water system.They trenched and tunneled into the gravelly water table of the Andean foothills, then built underground aqueducts, lined with smooth river stone, to move the water down to them.Miles of these tunnels supplied their towns and irrigated their fields in the coastal desert. Along them, they constructed broad spiraling holes called ojos, or eyes, some of them 50 feet in width.These served as access portals for the Nazca to descend into, clean and maintain the aqueducts.Recently, a team of scientists discovered that the ojos’ spiral mouths, and their positioning, had a further purpose. They caught the prevailing winds and ducted them down into the system, using the increased air pressure to pump the water along.It’s a system so well engineered and constructed that 36 of these aqueducts are still in service today, 1,500 years later, bringing water to a city that bears the name of these ancient architects: Nazca, Peru.

Besides a few very committed scientists, there’s only one organism that can live on the continent of Antarctica year-round. It’s not a penguin or a seal; they live mostly at sea.No, it’s the tiny Antarctic midge, just a quarter inch long and extremely adapted to the extreme environment.Midges are small insects that usually fly and bite hosts to feed on blood. The Antarctic midge does neither.Like many insects in very windy places, it has lost its wings to keep from being blown away—and here—to avoid losing heat.This midge can thrive in temperatures down to five degrees Fahrenheit and actually requires subfreezing conditions to survive.It does this by dehydrating itself, losing up to 70 percent of its water, and producing antifreeze-like proteins in its blood.The larvae, which look like tiny worms, hatch from eggs and congregate just below the ice, eating bacteria and penguin dung on the rocky shores, where they have no predators.This is by far their longest life stage, lasting three years: until in their third summer, they molt into adults and live about a week to breed.The females lay eggs in a protective antifreeze gel, then die, and the cycle starts again.Yet another example of the wide-ranging adaptability into narrow environmental niches of life on Earth.

We’ve talked before about how lightning breaks nitrogen molecules into nitric oxide—which falls to Earth in rainwater and nourishes plants.But we now know that lightning storms have another essential function.After forming nitric oxide, a secondary reaction makes oxidants, which clean the atmosphere.Oxidants are essentially water molecules that lost a hydrogen atom. To replace it, they react with other compounds, including methane and CO2.They oxidize these into other forms that also fall to Earth in rain, thereby reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.The volume of oxidants was thought to be tiny—a few parts per trillion.Until, in 2012, some brave atmospheric scientists flew their research plane directly into electrical storms in Texas and Oklahoma. They were stunned to find oxidant levels thousands of times higher even though no lightning was present.Eventually, they figured out that invisible electrical discharges in the top of a thunderhead, before lightning is formed, produce huge volumes of oxidants directly—without first forming nitric oxide.Their new estimates suggest that electrical storms could produce a sixth of our atmosphere’s cleansing oxidants.Studies suggest that, if Earth continues to warm, we’ll have more lightning, which could increase atmospheric oxidants and help counter rising greenhouse gas levels.

As we know, birds descended from dinosaurs. And with 18,000 species of bird now living, there may be more “dinosaur” species today than ever before. The birds that share the most DNA with their dinosaur ancestors are, surprisingly, the chicken and the turkey.The turkey, like the tyrannosaur, has a wishbone and a similar hip structure. And it has meaty drumsticks and thighs like a Velociraptor. Yum!The turkey probably evolved from prehistoric birds in South America and migrated northward.During the last Ice Age, the California turkey was a favorite food for humans, with bones found at cooking sites. That turkey went extinct 10,000 years ago, probably from overhunting and warming as the ice retreated.Luckily, the Mexican turkey persevered. It was domesticated by the Maya, then the invading Spaniards, who took it back to Europe and on to England.Because it was considered an exotic food, and many exotic foods came from the Ottoman Empire, it was called the Turkish cock, then simply, turkey.From England, the domestic bird was exported back to North America. Meanwhile, the wild variety here had again been hunted nearly to extinction.A reintroduction campaign has brought back the wild turkey. There are now 7 million in the US living free—while 45 million of their domesticated cousins are destined each year for the Thanksgiving table.

Mesopotamia, in the Middle East, is known as the birthplace of civilization. Two of its early civilizations mysteriously collapsed, which baffled researchers until they found the reason—in stalagmites.Around 10,000 years ago, hunter-gatherers there developed agriculture and domesticated animals. Abundant food and animal labor allowed them time to invent: the wheel, glassmaking, and eventually writing.This set the stage for the world’s first empires: the Akkadians then the Neo-Assyrians controlled all of Mesopotamia, though a thousand years apart. And both suddenly vanished.Recently, some geologists went looking for clues in the region’s caves.Water, dripping from the cave ceiling to the floor, carries minerals from the world above. Over centuries, the minerals solidify to form stalagmites, in layers like tree rings. By carefully analyzing each layer, the geologists discovered the kingdoms’ fates.When both empires rose and thrived, the stalagmites were growing rapidly—indicating abundant groundwater from years of good rainfall, which brought plentiful crops.Their collapses coincided with slow stalagmite growth and thin mineral layers high in magnesium—indicating scarce rainfall and frequent dust storms.Both kingdoms were brought down by centuries-long drought.In this and other ways, geologists are helping to understand extreme climates of the past.

Here are two trivia questions for you: What’s the strongest metal on Earth? And why is it called “wolf cream”?It was discovered in the 1400’s when miners found a hairy black mineral with tin ore. When they smelted the two together, the surface of the melted ore foamed and a heavy slag consumed much of the tin.They named the mineral “wolf” for its furry appearance and appetite for tin and “rahm” or cream for the foam. Wolfram. In Europe, it’s still called that.But elsewhere, it has a name given by a Swedish chemist who found it with iron ore. It was much heavier, so he called it “heavy stone.” In Swedish, tung-sten.After separating the pure metal, he found tungsten was not only a new element but extremely strong.It’s now used today whenever a highly durable metal is required, especially in its even harder alloy form, tungsten carbide.You can find it in household items like the ball in a ball point pen.But it has more exotic uses, in X-ray machines and X-ray resistant aprons. In armor and armor-piercing artillery. In rock drills and tunneling machines. In jet and rocket engines.It won’t rust or react to acids. It’s 100 times as abrasion resistant as steel, yet it’s easy to recycle.Tungsten, wolfram, really is a beast of a metal.

On November 1, across Latin America but especially in Mexico, the cemeteries come alive—with a celebration.It’s Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Legend has it the gates of heaven open for a day to allow the souls of the dead to reunite with loved ones.It’s considered disrespectful to mourn the dead, so families bring food and drink, clean and decorate gravestones, sing, and dance, fly brightly colored kites, and tell stories about and for the deceased.Dia de los Muertos is a melding of the Catholic All Saints’ Day brought by the Spanish with the centuries-old tradition of ancestor worship by the native peoples.Just how many ancestors could we be celebrating? Some enterprising statisticians decided to figure that out.This took a lot of ciphering and, for different places and eras, assumption—about infant mortality, birthing age of women, size of families, survival rates of disease, the impacts of drought, famine, and war on populations.In the end, they calculated that 109 billion deceased people have preceded the 8 billion alive today, for a very grand total of 114 billion humans who have occupied Earth.In 2050, when population is projected to peak around 10 billion, there will be some 110 billion ancestors to worship.Now that will be a Dia de los Muertos to remember!

Whakaari/White Island is New Zealand’s largest active volcano. Its crater forms a huge natural amphitheater that opens to a bay.In December 2019, a large group of tourists arrived for a day trip. They donned gas masks to watch fumaroles spew clouds of yellow steam.Then, disaster struck. The volcano erupted suddenly, belching vapor and ash two miles into the sky. The cloud collapsed into the amphitheater, which funneled it directly at the tourists.Half were killed and the other half suffered severe burns and lung damage from sulfuric acid fumes.Scientists set out to analyze the eruption. Like most in the region, and many of the largest in the world, it was hydrothermal.Water trapped in rock pores becomes superheated by shallow magma, increasing pressure. Then an external trigger, like a seismic tremor, destabilizes the system causing a huge instantaneous steam explosion.Researchers used modern machine learning to analyze 40 years of eruption data at Whakaari. They found seismic patterns of magma movement in the subsurface, which superheated water and triggered the steam release.Their new understanding could help predict future eruptions here. But the technique will have to be customized for other volcanoes and, for some, warning time may be very short.If you’ve ever thought about visiting an active volcano, you should be aware that none are completely safe.

Bloodletting with leeches seems a very primitive practice. So, it may surprise you to know it’s still very much in use today.There are 700 species of leech. Most dwell in water and drink blood from fish, turtles, ducks, frogs and other creatures. Scientists can even track which animals are living in swamps and rainforests by capturing leeches and DNA testing the blood in their stomachs.Leeches were first used in medicine at least 2,500 years ago. They became so popular in nineteenth-century Europe that overharvesting made them threatened.Today, we’ve recognized that leeches do in fact have surprising medical benefits.When they bite to extract blood, they inject over 60 compounds in their saliva that work as blood thinners, anti-inflammatories, antimicrobials and anesthetics. We’ve synthesized several of these and use them widely.We even still use the leeches themselves. In the U.S., they’re approved as medical devices!When surgeons reattach extremities like fingers or hands, leeches can be used to slowly drain blood that otherwise might pool and become deoxygenated.Tests have found that natural anesthesia from leeches is highly effective in controlling pain from joint diseases like rheumatoid arthritis. And they’re used for treating vein disease as well.So, if you need a medical procedure in the future, don’t be too surprised if your doctor prescribes leeches!

Until Marie Tharp came along, no one knew what the seafloor really looked like.It was long thought to be a featureless plain of mud.Then sonar, invented in World War II, began to give us a glimpse. But it could only “read” the bottom of the ocean right below the ship’s path.Marie Tharp earned master’s degrees in geology and mathematics in the 1940’s and joined the navy to study the seafloor—but women were not allowed on research ships.Instead, she was assigned to process and analyze new sonar data from hundreds of voyages.She soon discovered a deep rift valley in the Atlantic Ocean, which suggested the ocean floor was expanding. But other scientists rejected the idea.By coincidence, Howard Foster, stationed at the next desk, was plotting undersea earthquake areas to avoid for a transatlantic cable. His fault zones lined up almost exactly with Tharp’s mid-Atlantic trench. They became convinced it was an active geological boundary.But the concept of plate tectonics was then so controversial that Tharp was fired. Undaunted, she continued to work from home.In the 1960’s, she and Dr. Bruce Heezen finally presented their combined data to the scientific community, displaying their new undersea topographic maps in spectacular color.Their work convinced the naysayers and has changed the way that people view and understand global geology.

We’ve talked a lot about fossils on EarthDate, but we’ve never talked about how they form.Normally, when a plant or animal dies, it decays or is consumed. But occasionally its remains are preserved as a fossil.This usually happens when the organism is buried quickly in sediment. The sediment layer protects it from the elements, scavengers, even oxygen. Often soft parts decompose, leaving bones, teeth, shells, or exoskeletons.As the sediment gradually hardens into rock, mineralized water is absorbed into the pores of the remains, gradually replacing the original material with rock.Fossils are often skeletons or seashells, but other materials can be fossilized: feathers, trees, leaves and seeds—dinosaur eggs, even animal poop, called coprolites.Amber is lithified tree sap that may trap and preserve small organisms within it, like mosquitos.The footprints of animals can be covered in sediment and preserved as fossil trackways, allowing us to study the way creatures moved, even their social structures.But the most common and numerous fossils are microscopic. In some places where ancient plankton rained down to the sea floor for millions of years, their exoskeletons have compacted together to form thick chalk deposits.Fossils provide records of the ancient world for us to read today, informing science and underpinning many of the stories you’ve heard on EarthDate.

Think about this: a tree could be 100, 200, more than 300 feet tall, yet can lift water from deep underground all the way to the leaves of its highest branches. Each day it could move hundreds of gallons, several tons of water this way.This gravity-defying feat is made possible not so much by the tree but by the properties of water itself.Trees perform photosynthesis in their leaves, which requires water. The hydrogen in water goes to form carbohydrates—sugar, the food for the tree. The oxygen is exhaled through pores in the leaves.Water also evaporates, or transpires, through these pores. It’s this transpiration from the leaves that pulls water up the trunk and branches to them.Now, that’s a long way to lift it, so the water itself helps. Water molecules have properties of both cohesion—they want to stick together—and adhesion—they want to stick to other things.You can see this in a water droplet on a windowpane: Cohesion holds it together. Adhesion sticks it to the glass.Water wants to stick to the insides of the tree’s vascular system. And it wants to stay connected in an unbroken column of water, advancing ever upward, until it evaporates from the leaves.Even if you don’t consider yourself a tree hugger, you can’t help but admire a tree’s incredible natural abilities.

When the explorer Ferdinand Magellan finally made it ‘round the treacherous horn of South America in 1521, the ocean beyond seemed especially calm—so he named it the peaceful sea: Mare pacificum, the Pacific Ocean.Little did he know the Pacific is anything but. It’s surrounded by more than 1,000 volcanoes that make up what’s now called the Pacific Ring of Fire—a geologically active strip 25,000 miles long, in places 300 miles wide, that borders the Pacific on three sides.It would be more than 400 years later, in 1960, that scientists could understand what was going on: almost the entire periphery of the Pacific Ocean consists of plate boundaries where tectonic plates slide against or are pushed under other plates.Whenever this happens, extraordinary energy is released.Two-thirds of Earth’s volcanic eruptions since the last Ice Age have happened in the Pacific Ring of Fire, including famous ones like Mount St. Helens.Ninety percent of the world’s earthquakes each year happen along the edges of the Pacific.This includes massive events, like the Tōhoku quake that caused the tsunami that flooded the Fukushima nuclear plant.Of course, the Pacific is also vital for navigation and trade, fishing and national economies and provides a livelihood for millions of people.Like most things in life, there are pros and cons.

DNA is like a fingerprint. Each species’ DNA signature is distinctive. And it can be found on the scene long after the individual has gone.For some time, scientists have gathered the DNA that organisms leave behind—in saliva, urine, feces, fur, and flakes of dry skin—to detect their presence and study them.They’ve found this so-called environmental DNA, or eDNA, in water, soil, even snow.But scientists wondered if they could gather it more easily and broadly by capturing it out of thin air.To test this, they set up vacuum devices at zoos and sucked in the air, trapping all particles within it on very fine filters.They then used a polymerase chain reaction—the same PCR methodology that’s become well known in Covid tests—to amplify DNA signatures of the particles.Surprisingly, from DNA in the air alone, they could catalog the animals in the zoo, from huge giraffes to tiny guppies in ponds.They also found eDNA of native animals, like squirrels and deer. Domesticated pets like cats and dogs. And of course, human visitors.The technique was not perfect however, missing the presence of some of the biggest creatures.But as it matures, gathering eDNA from the air has powerful potential to measure populations, track elusive animals, detect pathogens, even solve crimes.

You’ve probably heard that black cars get hotter than white cars.Scientists set out to measure the difference. They parked two otherwise identical cars in a sunny parking lot, and, sure enough, the white car’s interior stayed 17 degrees Fahrenheit cooler.Urban planners hope to use the same principle to cool cites, where miles of black asphalt and dark colored roofs absorb the sun’s heat, amplifying daytime temperatures, then radiate the heat through the night.The famous white villages of Spain have addressed this issue for centuries—by painting everything white.Today’s scientists are going a step further, creating super white paint, which could be used on buildings and rooftops.Standard white paint reflects 80 to 90 percent of visible light. This new paint uses calcium carbonate, or chalk, as a whitener and reflects 95 percent, cooling the surface temperature by 3 degrees Fahrenheit.An even more experimental paint uses barium sulfide. It reflects 98 percent of visible light and cools the surface by 8 degrees!If painted on a 1,000 square foot surface, it has more cooling power than a residential air conditioning system—yet requires no electricity.These paints are currently expensive, rare and fragile. But if perfected in the future, a simple coat of paint could lower the temperatures in cities. Now that’s cool!

There’s a common houseplant that in the wild can do what no other plant can.It’s the staghorn fern.It’s an epiphyte, meaning it doesn’t need soil but instead grows on a larger host plant and draws its nutrients from water and air.But that’s not what makes it unique.Normally a staghorn has two types of fronds. One is green, antler shaped and produces spores. The other is brown, strap-like and sterile, and attaches the fern to the host.But a scientist noticed that wild staghorns in Australia grew in colonies in which genetically identical plants took different forms.The ferns at the bottom of the colony had only brown, sterile fronds. At the top, the ferns were only green and fertile.The brown ferns supported the green ferns. The green ones funneled water down to the brown. And a network of roots connected them together.It became apparent that this was a social colony of cooperative individuals, like a beehive or an ant mound.Scientists are trying to figure out if the plants at the bottom are older and have just grown naturally sterile while new green plants keep growing on top of the last generation.Or if there’s some kind of chemical signal between the plants that makes them behave differently.Either way, no other plant has shown this kind of communal behavior— a truly unique evolution for ferns.