Author: Derrick Lester

When a creature appears and refuses to sit in any of the tidy drawers designed for it, biology is filled with a subtle kind of embarrassment. That’s what’s happening right now, and it’s happening in the shadowy crevices of the Japan, Ryukyu, and Izu-Ogasawara trenches at a depth that most people will never see in their lifetimes—roughly 9,137 meters below the Pacific’s surface. The discovery was made during a 2022 expedition sponsored by Caladan Oceanic and Inkfish and headed by the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology and the University of Western Australia’s Minderoo Deep-Sea Research Centre. On board…

When you spend enough time on any beach, you begin to notice things. The way the tide pulls its fingers across the sand. The odd little berms that remain after a storm. Once leading down to dunes, the wooden stairs at the end of a boardwalk now descend awkwardly into open water. It’s difficult to ignore the shifting boundary between land and sea. It is also moving in a single direction nearly all the time. It’s becoming more difficult to ignore the numbers. In the US, coastal erosion destroys about $500 million worth of property annually, and the federal government…

A graveyard is located off the coast of the Galápagos Islands, nearly a kilometer below the surface. There is no marking on it. It doesn’t receive any visitors. However, for years, scientists have been extracting skeletons from those icy, dark waters, and the tale those skeletons tell is probably more concerning than it is. There, a community of deep-sea stony corals coexisted peacefully for over 117,000 years. They made it through the previous Ice Age. The subsequent warming did not harm them. They endured climatic fluctuations that altered continents and coastlines. Then, about 5,000 years ago, they just vanished. Not…

Like most paperwork, it arrived on a Wednesday and was quietly entered into the public record. However, anyone keeping an eye on the markets knew what it meant. The company that practically everyone just refers to as SpaceX, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., has taken the regulatory step that, if everything goes according to plan, could result in one of the biggest stock market debuts in American history. The filing states that the ticker will be SPCX. Nasdaq. Three letters, decades in the making. As you watch this happen, you get the impression that the moment has been postponed for so…

Over the weekend, the sun did something that it does frequently but infrequently with such dire consequences. It had a fit. A few coronal mass ejections—those enormous, bright bursts of magnetized plasma—slipped off the surface of the sun and started to drift toward us. Forecasters predict that the majority of that material will pass just north of Earth. However, the phrase “just north” is ambiguous in space-weather terminology. If there is enough of it, the planet’s magnetic field could still be clipped, which would be interesting in two very different ways. The first is lovely. Some people find the second…

Despite being the basis for almost everything in our environment, physicists hardly ever bring up this peculiar little fact at dinner parties. The two protons and two neutrons that make up a helium nucleus weigh less than the components required to construct it. Not significantly. However, it is lighter. And that missing bit of mass, when multiplied by the square of the speed of light, is what powers the reactors close to Lyon, lights the stars, and, in August 1945, flattened two cities. It’s known as nuclear binding energy, and it’s the kind of concept that, after careful consideration, begins…

When investors lose faith in an energy market, a certain kind of silence descends upon it. That’s how Mexico has felt for the majority of the last six years: a nation with exceptional solar radiation and consistent Tehuantepec winds, but with foreign developers silently closing their offices and shifting their funds to Chile, Brazil, or back across the border to Texas. It was evident in the conference circuit, where the number of Mexican panels decreased annually. No one pretended otherwise; something had broken. Now, and more quickly than most anticipated, that silence is ending. The door has partially reopened under…

As is always the case, the paperwork arrived on a Wednesday. A prospectus with the ticker symbol SPCX and listing venue Nasdaq was discreetly submitted to the SEC. The rockets continued to be stacked somewhere in Boca Chica, Texas, even though traders in midtown were already exchanging rumors about the pricing range by the end of the afternoon. It seems both inevitable and a little unlikely that SpaceX will go public. The figures are the kind that cause seasoned bankers to pause for a moment. An estimated $1.25 trillion. An IPO that might be the biggest in Wall Street’s history.…

The way this story develops is almost unsettling. Cleaner air was seen for decades as one of the clear benefits of environmental policy: fewer children with asthma, fewer hospital admissions on days with poor air quality, fewer smokestacks coughing sulfur into the sky. According to scientists, the same triumph might be contributing to ocean temperatures rising beyond what the models predicted. Exactly, it’s not a contradiction. It’s more akin to a bill that was supposed to arrive sooner rather than later. The headline number from the University of Washington team led by Dr. Knut von Salzen is small enough to…

Antarctica appeared to be the only region of the planet that had not received the message about climate change for a considerable amount of time. The floating sea ice surrounding the southern continent continued to grow, obstinately, almost defiantly, while the Arctic was losing ice at an alarming rate. It was once referred to by researchers as the planet’s heartbeat, a term that now seems almost nostalgic. Then 2016 arrived. The ice did not simply retreat. It fell apart. Scientists are quietly uneasy about what has transpired since. Sea ice extent had dropped so much below the long-term average by…