For most of recorded history, the answer seemed obvious. Look up: the sun rises, crosses the sky, and sets. Look down: the ground under your feet doesn’t move. Every sense a person has says the Earth sits still while the universe turns around it. That assumption held for something like two thousand years of astronomy,
The Copernican Principle: What We Learned From Losing the Center of the Universe Read More »
Nearly five centuries after Copernicus removed Earth from the center of the universe, the same instinct he corrected — assuming your own vantage point is the special one — still misleads forecasters, founders, and everyday decisions.
Cut a cross-section through a Douglas fir trunk and you are looking at a machine that has been moving and banking energy, without pumping, for a century or more. Materials scientists have started looking at that machine less as a metaphor and more as a blueprint. ONE IDEA A tree’s vascular system solves a problem
Biomimicry researchers are looking to plant biology for clues that could make grid-scale energy storage cheaper and longer-lasting.
Ten years of reef surveys across the Pacific and the Atlantic are converging on an uncomfortable, and oddly hopeful, conclusion: coral reefs are not dying in unison. Some are eroding fast. Others, sitting in water that looks nearly identical from a boat, are holding their ground — and the difference has as much to do
A decade of reef surveys is complicating the simple story about coral decline.