Friday morning at around 10:30 local time, a magnitude 4.8 earthquake popped three miles below Whitehouse Station, New Jersey. Though nowhere near the magnitude of the West Coast’s monster quakes, the seismic waves traveled hundreds of miles, jostling not just nearby New York City, but Philadelphia and Boston and Washington, DC. The United States Geological … Read more
On April 12, 2019, Boston University finally fired David Marchant for sexually harassing Willenbring. (The university said it could not corroborate her claims of physical and psychological abuse.) Marchant released a statement, which the journal Science quoted as vowing that he had “never” sexually harassed anyone, “not in 1998 or 1999 in Antarctica or at … Read more
The water that pours out of your tap, or that’s unnecessarily packaged in a single-use bottle, or that helped grow the produce in your fridge—all of it may well have come from aquifers somewhere. These are layers of underground material that hold water, and can be made up of porous rock or sediments like sand … Read more
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In addition to burying solid carbon or sprinkling it on fields, researchers are also turning waste biomass into liquid carbon—oil, essentially, that they pump back into the ground instead of pumping the fossil variety up. “What we do at the highest level is we make barbecue sauce—or liquid smoke for barbecue sauce—and then we inject … Read more
Below is New York’s JFK Airport—notice the red hotspots of high subsidence against the teal of more mild elevation change. The airport’s average subsidence rate is 1.7 millimeters a year (similar to the LaGuardia and Newark airports), but across JFK that varies between 0.8 and 2.8 millimeters a year, depending on the exact spot. Courtesy … Read more
Fluids can be roughly divided into two categories: regular ones and weird ones. Regular ones, like water and alcohol, act more or less as expected when pumped through pipes or stirred with a spoon. Lurking among the weird ones—which include substances such as paint, honey, mucus, blood, ketchup, and oobleck—are a vast variety of behavioral … Read more
