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Science
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Science
A railroad causeway built across Utah’s Great Salt Lake nearly divided it into two separate bodies of water with radically different salinity — today the north side can appear pink-purple while the south remains blue-green
A railway built to save time inadvertently created two chemically distinct worlds, each with its own microbial ecosystem and vivid color palette.
Finnish engineers packed 2,000 tonnes of crushed stone left over from making fireplaces into a giant “sand battery” — electricity heats the material, which stores enough energy to cover roughly a week of winter demand on a local heating network
MIT engineers made water filters from slices of tree branches that removed more than 99% of E. coli and rotavirus in lab tests — after trials in India, the team designed a gravity-fed prototype that could filter a liter of water an hour
Australian scientists extracted an enzyme from soil bacteria that produces electricity using traces of hydrogen in the air — it still worked after freezing or heating to 80°C, opening a possible route to small air-powered devices
Germany set up 75 insect traps across the country, sequenced roughly four billion fragments of DNA from what they caught, and identified 10,803 species, while statistical modeling suggests the samples already captured evidence of roughly 32,000, most still unidentified for lack of a reference DNA barcod
Only two northern white rhinos are left, a mother and daughter who cannot carry a calf, and after 39 laboratory embryos and six transfers into surrogate mothers not one of the attempts has held
For decades visitors tossed coins and trash into Yellowstone's Morning Glory Pool, and the debris clogged its vent and cooled the water — the spring named for its deep blue now runs green and orange, and rangers say the original color may never come back
Hoover Dam was cast in columns because one solid pour would take 125 years to reach air temperature
Standard stellar-evolution models predict few black holes born directly between about 60 and 130 solar masses, yet GW231123 appeared to involve objects of roughly 137 and 103 solar masses. A new analysis argues that gravitational lensing magnified and distorted the signal, making the merger appear closer—and therefore intrinsically heavier—than it was. Under this still-unconfirmed interpretation, its combined mass falls from 190–265 to 100–180 Suns, making the system far less extreme.
Researchers placed 650 geophones along Yellowstone's roads and sent a vibrating truck to 110 different spots to deliberately shake America's most-visited supervolcano, and the echoes revealed a layer 2.4 miles down that is roughly 86 percent solid rock.
Four fixed half-pipe reflectors in British Columbia, each 100 meters long and strung with 1,024 antennas, watched the same overhead strip of sky from July 25, 2018 to September 15, 2023 and logged 4,539 fast radio bursts from 3,641 separate sources, on a telescope that cannot be aimed.
