Maddie Stone

EartherClimate Change

After Thousands of Years, Earth’s Frozen Life Forms Are Waking Up

What’s happening in Siberia’s thawing permafrost and Greenland’s melting glaciers sounds borderline supernatural. Ancient viruses, bacteria, plants, and even animals have been cryogenically frozen there for millennia—and now, they are waking up. Image: Pixabay Cryofreezing is best known for its appearances in science fiction, but self-styled “resurrection ecologists” are now showing the world just how … Continued

SciencePhysics & Chemistry

How Nanoscale Optics Create Nature’s Most Dazzling Colors

What do a butterfly’s shimmering wings, a fish’s opalescent scales, and a peacock’s brilliant feathers have in common? Yes, their colors are beautifully iridescent. But they are also produced by the physical interaction of light with sophisticated nanoscale architecture that we are only just beginning to understand. Image: Wikimedia Most creatures get their color from … Continued

ScienceSpace & Spaceflight

How Asteroid Mining Could Pay for Our First Space Colony

Many of us dream of living on other planets, but are two things we’ll need before it can actually happen: money and raw materials. Now some companies say they have a solution to this problem. They’ll mine asteroids for valuable metal ores, and for basic resources like water that we’ll need once we’re far from … Continued

Tech News

Massive Forest Fires Could Be Cooling the Earth

Wait, what? A forest fire may not sound like a great way to cool off, but Earth’s climate is a complicated beast. It turns out that some of the world’s fiercest blazes are actually lowering our planet’s temperatures. Top image: Wikimedia The remote boreal forests that blanket massive swaths of Canada and Alaska aren’t just … Continued