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SCIENCE
The Massive Campaign to Air-Drop Tiny Rabies Vaccines to Raccoons
The National Rabies Management Program was established in 1997 to prevent the further spread of wildlife rabies. In 2007, canine rabies was eliminated in the US thanks to mandatory vaccination and licensing for dogs, but the risk from…
Disappearing Glaciers Expose Vast New Ecosystems That Need Protection
Rising temperatures could reduce the area covered by alpine glaciers around the world by more than one-fifth this century, exposing vast areas of land to the atmosphere for the first time in thousands of years. The emerging habitats that…
A New Idea for How to Assemble Life
According to assembly theory, before Darwinian evolution can proceed, something has to select for multiple copies of high-AI objects from the Assembly Possible. Chemistry alone, Cronin said, might be capable of that—by narrowing down…
Six Ways to Stay Safe Outdoors in Extreme Heat
The summer sun has been anything but fun for many this year. Brutal temperatures torched records across the U.S. as they peaked globally in July. Relentless heat waves baked the Southwest and rolled into the Midwest and South,…
When You Drop a Rock Overboard, What Happens to the Water Level?
Physics questions are the most fun when people don't immediately agree on the answer. What feels intuitive or obvious—sometimes isn’t. We can argue over the solution for hours of entertainment, and we might even learn something in the…
Why Hot Overnight Temperatures Are So Dangerous
In the midst of an already record-breaking heat wave, Phoenix, Ariz., set a particularly eye-popping record: the temperature only dropped to 97 degrees Fahrenheit overnight between Tuesday and Wednesday, setting an all-time record high…
A Hair Loss Study Raises New Questions About Aging Cells
Next, they got patients from a hair transplant clinic to donate follicles, then grafted those healthy hairs onto mice. Follicles normally undergo a sort of shock after a transplant, going dormant for a couple months. Plikus suspected…
Solar Maximum Could Hit Us Harder And Sooner Than We Thought
From a distance, the sun may seem calm and steady. But zoom in, and our home star is actually in a perpetual state of flux, transforming over time from a uniform sea of fire to a chaotic jumble of warped plasma and back again in a…
The One-Shot Drug That Keeps on Dosing
Today they use lab robots to fill the capsules, and they are working to automate the entire process, which they call Pulsed, for Particles Uniformly Liquified and Sealed to Encapsulate Drugs. McHugh believes that this automation cuts…
When a Wildfire Burns a City Built for Extracting Oil
Nonfiction
Uncontrolled Burn
Absurdity reigns when a wildfire threatens a town purpose-built for oil extraction
Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World
by John Vaillant
Knopf, 2023 ($32.50)
In May 2016 a wildfire…