In the mid-1970s, Linnda Caporael was a college student facing a seemingly mundane decision. A science major at U.C. Santa Barbara, she needed a humanities course to graduate. The course she chose, on women in American history, came with a term paper, and she had to pick a topic. Caporael’s first choice—Lydia Wardell, a Quaker
A migrating monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) recently brought into Sweetbriar Nature Center in Smithtown on New York’s Long Island came with a unique backstory. The male butterfly flew into a nearby house and landed on a pot of refried beans. The man living there took the butterfly out of the pan, but by morning the
Griffith Observatory is one of Los Angeles’s most iconic landmarks. Part of the city’s sprawling “urban wilderness,” Griffith Park, the free public science center boasts dozens of exhibits and displays, including one of the first planetariums in the United States and the most-viewed telescope in the world. But there’s a dark secret behind Griffith Observatory’s
Even after decades of meteorological advances, weather forecasting remains infamously difficult. Today’s most trusted models are rarely accurate beyond a two-week window due to a constant cascade of atmospheric and climatic variables. These unpredictable meteorological interactions are the foundations of chaos theory. The interdisciplinary field studies how even the world’s most predictable systems can still
Unlike a tornado or thunderstorm that can deliver destruction in minutes, El Niño exerts its influence over many months. This year, a drought accompanying El Niño has left the Amazon rainforest primed to burn, and scientists say the region has entered the early stages of what they think will be a long and severe fire
Explanation: The city lights outshine the stars in the City That Never Sleeps. Who would have thought that the Milky Way could be visible in this sky? This image was taken with a filter that blocks most visible light, capturing instead only light in the near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum (with lower energy than