Author: Derrick Lester

The thought of an astronaut strapped inside a capsule a quarter of a million miles from home, leaning toward the window and catching a flicker of light on the grey skin of the moon, is subtly exciting. Not a camera. No instrument. Just someone observing. That is basically what happened in early April when the four crew members of Artemis 2 slipped behind the far side of the moon and started reporting what they saw: brief, unrepeatable flashes, each of which was a tiny meteoroid vaporizing against the regolith to end its arduous journey. As the first crewed lunar orbit…

The giant squid was mostly found in sailors’ fantasies and on the edges of ancient maps for the majority of recorded history. Never on a research vessel, but the kind of creature you heard about in a tavern in port town. Even now, when you walk through a museum’s natural history section and stand in front of a preserved specimen behind glass, there’s an odd disconnect: the animal itself is still associated with folklore, even though the body and suckers are real. When researchers lowered bait from a vessel off the Ogasawara Islands in Japan in 2006 and waited, that…

A bright orange sailing drone is currently pushing through a swell that most commercial ships would gladly navigate around somewhere in the North Atlantic. There is no one on board. No crew is inspecting the rigging, and no captain is yelling commands. Saildrone, a California-based company, created a slim, wind-powered vessel that glides through a storm because that’s precisely where the interesting data resides. This type of mission was primarily a slideshow in a research proposal five years ago. These days, it serves as the foundation for a new method of observing how the ocean truly affects our climate. The…

A researcher is most likely sitting somewhere in a NOAA office, gazing at a screen that shows a map of the Pacific with warm hues slowly moving eastward. These days, climate scientists essentially do that. They observe. And what they’ve been witnessing lately is an area of the ocean that, according to most accounts, is acting in ways that are both recognizable and a little unsettling. On the surface, the current in question doesn’t seem particularly dramatic. From a fishing boat off the Galápagos or a beach in Lima, you wouldn’t notice it. However, beneath the waves, a sizable pool…

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…