Something More Than 3,000 Miles Down Keeps Adjusting the Length of Your Day
Days have been running a few milliseconds long or short for decades. The culprit is a lopsided ball of iron that keeps drifting out of line and getting dragged back.
Deep Time
Virtual contributor and essayist writing about the Earth for four decades without ever taking a geology course. Semi-retired but continues to write long essays about the philosophy of Earth time, human scale, and, of course, all things weird.
2,000-Year-Old Cliff Paintings in Southern China Are Still Bleeding Red
Monsoons, typhoons and 2,000 years of heat couldn't strip these paintings from the cliffs. The ingredient that may have held them there came from somewhere far more personal.
Earth’s Building Blocks Are Local, Not Imported
Jupiter may have blocked almost everything from the outer solar system. Somehow, Earth still ended up with the ingredients that mattered.
84 Objects Are Hiding in Nearby Galaxies. They Vanish When You Look Too Hard.
Something in six galaxies is pouring out ultraviolet light and low-energy X-rays in a combination no known object produces. Nobody knows what it is yet.
A Trebuchet Left 160 Fractures in a Medieval Skeleton. The Closest Modern Match Is a Car Crash.
A forensic pattern so specific it crosses seven centuries. What leaves that kind of signature on a medieval skeleton buried under a Scottish castle?
The Magnetosphere's Safety Ceiling Might Not Exist
Scientists came up with roughly 10 explanations for why Earth's magnetic response stops getting stronger. A new study says they may all have been explaining the wrong thing.
Asteroid Stitched Together Like a Cosmic Frankenstein
A century of observations, and we were off by two. What else out there is three things pretending to be one?
Juan Seguín Helped Win Texas Independence. Then Texas Drove Him Out.
Juan Seguín warned Texas its enemies were coming. Months later, he was riding with them.
The Hiroshima Fireball Left Behind a Metal That Had Never Existed Before
A grain of glass from that August morning contains a substance that doesn't appear in any known materials catalog, natural or man-made. It took eighty years to notice something that formed in less than a second.
The Ape Family Tree Had a Blank Spot. Two Jawbones Landed in It.
Early apes cluster in East Africa. Later ones turn up in Eurasia. Between them was a missing stretch of the map. Paleontologists went looking there and found two fossil fragments.
The Ice Age's Headless Women Didn't Stay in France
A prehistoric European figure turns up carved into a north Sinai cave wall, thousands of miles from where researchers expected it. Archaeologists have no explanation for the overlap.
The Amber That Remembered a World Before Trees Knew What Insects Were
The fragment is smaller than a sesame seed. It predates the first dinosaurs by more than 100 million years. Nobody's sure yet what the plant was trying to protect itself from.
10,000 Coal Miners Armed Themselves and Marched on West Virginia. The Government Sent Warplanes.
They fought a private army with rifles and lost. But who they surrendered to, and who they refused to surrender to, is the part that sticks.
An American City Government Was Overthrown at Gunpoint. For a Century, They Called It a Riot.
One word says chaos happened. The other says someone planned it. Wilmington, 1898, was planned. What does it mean that the wrong word won for a hundred years?
Britain's Famous Bronze Age Bearded Shaman Was a Woman Who Made Gold
She ran a metalworking operation near Stonehenge 4,000 years ago. For two centuries, every museum label had her sex wrong. The tools never lied. The assumption did.
Princess Ita's Dagger Was Not Ceremonial
These women were buried with real weapons. The bones confirm it. The more uncomfortable question is what else we've been calling symbolic.
The Galaxy You Are Standing In Was Upside Down 10 Billion Years Ago
Something hit the Milky Way so hard it flipped. What that means for every star in it, including ours, is still being worked out.
A 248-Year-Old Notebook Sat Misfiled in Paris. It Turned Out to Be New Mozart.
A curator sorting through a pile of unlabeled manuscripts noticed the handwriting looked familiar. It should have.