Author: Derrick Lester

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…

The High Seas Treaty was surprisingly quiet for something that took almost two decades to negotiate. In September, four nations—Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, Morocco, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines—deposited their ratification documents at the UN, subtly raising the total to sixty. That was the cutoff point. The agreement officially went into effect on January 17, 2026. There is no fanfare, no headlines that compete with market panics or election cycles. This is merely a procedural milestone that, if successful, might change how people treat two-thirds of the planet. The BBNJ Agreement is the first legally binding agreement created to…

A research ship slows to a crawl somewhere between Guam and the Solomon Islands. Barely a drift at two knots. A cylindrical robot is lowered into the nearly artificially blue water as the crew assembles close to the stern. No fanfare is present. There was no press release. After a few pictures and the gentle mechanical clunk of equipment, the float disappears below the surface, starting a journey that will last longer than the actual expedition. This is how ocean science is undergoing a quiet revolution. slowly. without any headlines. One float at a time. The robots in question are…

The northeast Pacific’s surface quietly did something it had never done before at some point in early September of last year. The average temperature of the water was about 69 degrees Fahrenheit, which sounds almost pleasant if you’re thinking of a swimming pool. However, it was almost half a degree warmer than any previous measurement recorded for that section of chilly ocean. Since May of last year, NOAA has been monitoring the heatwave, which is known by the dry abbreviation NEP25A, which is only used by government scientists. When it peaked on September 10, 2025, it covered an area of…

A research ship dropped a steel box into water so deep that sunlight stopped existing thousands of meters above it somewhere between Honolulu and the middle of nowhere. The crew bided their time. Manganese nodules, those odd, potato-shaped rocks that have become the focus of a small, well-funded industry that is betting on the seafloor as the next great frontier for cobalt, nickel, and copper, were supposed to be inside the box when it came back up. The box was filled with sediment instead. Only sediment. Not the haul that everyone had secretly hoped for. The goal of that late-2025…