Author: Natalie Dillon

When they go to the beach, most people don’t give much thot to what lives in the sand. The water looks clean, the shore feels like home, and a jellyfish that washed up nearby is usually the biggest worry that can be seen. They are waiting just below the wet surface of the swash zone, which is the rough area where the waves break and pull back. There are often hundreds of these creatures waiting. They’re not as big as a rice grain. They will bite you if you don’t move for a long time. The scientific name for sand…

In the field, there are times that researchers look forward to their whole careers. Dr. Alexis Levengood found hers while on a research boat off the coast of Hervey Bay, Queensland. A bottlenose dolphin broke the surface of the water with something very large in its mouth. She said her response was quick and not based on science: she started screaming. An important thing that the University of the Sunshine Coast team was able to do was film a dolphin doing something scientists call “shelling.” It’s a way for dolphins to hunt. They chase fish into a big empty shell,…

Haean is a small basin in Yanggu county that is close to the border with North Korea. Lee Sang-hyuk has been farming there for forty years. He has seen droughts, late frosts, and a lot of rain. He didn’t see this. The fields he went into last week looked healthy—they were green, leafy, and plain on the outside. He then started to dig. It turned out to be potatoes that were already soft. Not gone bad from sickness. Not broken by bugs. The heat had cooked them in the ground, just like a pot of boiling water would. “It’s not…

Early readings show that the temperature at Kew Gardens in west London reached 38.1C on Thursday afternoon. The front-of-house manager at the Pickled Plum pub in Pershore, Worcestershire, said that people were “melting as they walked in off the street.” It was cooler outside than in the kitchen, even tho the blinds were closed and the fans were on. The kitchen is usually the hottest room in a building. Tho it seems like a small thing, it shows something real about Britain in the summer of 2026. It’s been hot in the UK five times this year. Five. A number…

In the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo city of Bunia, health workers are moving thru crowded streets to look for a virus they can’t quite see. About 30 percent of cases are being reached. That means that the other 70% are out there, in homes, markets, or on river boats that are quarantined. It’s a bad picture, and most reports say it’s getting worse. The current Ebola outbreak began in February 2026 but was officially declared in May 2026. There have been over 4,300 confirmed cases and more than 2,000 deaths. At the rate things are going, the WHO’s…

It’s still August. It’s hot and humid, and most people are thinking about plans for the end of summer instead of snow tires. Still, weather forecasters are already working behind the scenes to make plans for what this winter might bring. From what I’ve heard, it won’t be easy. The Farmers’ Almanac has been keeping track of North American weather patterns since 1818. This week, it released its winter forecast for 2026–2027. The headline doesn’t exactly make you feel better. The winter of 2026–2027 is shaping up to be very different from one another. There will be active storms in…

Deep-ocean footage has a certain kind of silence. There is no wind. No background noise. Just a remote-controlled vehicle slicing through pitch-black water, its lights grazing the edges of rock formations that haven’t seen anything in millions of years, not even light. That’s about what scientists saw during NOAA’s most recent deep-sea survey operations off the coast of Hawaii, and what the cameras captured has forced geologists into unsettling but fascinating territory. The results were not presented in a single, dramatic moment. Through NOAA’s ongoing Beyond the Blue campaign and its Ocean Exploration Cooperative Institute missions, which have been methodically…

A new hydrographic survey project to map and characterize over 30,000 square nautical miles of seafloor off U.S. waters was announced by NOAA in January 2026. A few hundred words made up the press release. It made very little sound as it landed. No public discussion, no cable news segment, and no congressional hearing. The silence was startling for an initiative linked to what might be one of the most important resource decisions of the upcoming ten years, and it’s difficult not to believe that it was at least partially deliberate. Only 54% of the United States’ own waters have…

There are rocks sitting in the dark somewhere on the Pacific Ocean floor, about five kilometers below the surface—deeper than most people can even imagine. They appear unremarkable. Brown and lumpy, about the size of a potato. Some of them are so much older than the human species that it is nearly meaningless. In complete silence, complete darkness, and complete cold, a single nodule can take ten million years to grow to the size of your fist, building itself one dissolved metal atom at a time.Millions of them are now being sought after by mining companies. On the surface, the…

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on a calm Monday morning in November 2025, carrying something unrelated to Silicon Valley aspirations or billionaire space dreams. Around 1,300 kilometers above the surface of a planet whose oceans are slowly and ceremoniously rising, the Copernicus Sentinel-6B satellite broke away from the rocket at 06:21 Central European Time and started its slow arc into orbit. The first signal was received by the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, at 07:54. It was weak and technical, but it seemed to be sufficient to bring relief…