Rubric 01
Science
What we know, what we are learning, and what the labs are not telling you.
325Science
Landslide risk maps reveal socioeconomic inequality
Landslides follow gravity, water, and the geometry of slopes. They are not mysterious events. Yet the tool that could save lives — a detailed map of where they will strike — has become a political battleground. The...
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326Science
Citizen scientists bury underpants to test global soil health
The experiment sounds like a prank: bury a pair of cotton underpants in the ground, wait two months, dig them up, and see what is left. But for a team of agroecologists, this was a serious research method. The...
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327Science
Nuclear Oversight Faces Independence Crisis
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, long considered a global reference point for atomic oversight, now faces a challenge that has little to do with reactor safety and everything to do with political pressure. The...
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328Science
C4 grasses thrive with rising CO2 during drought
For decades, the scientific community operated on a simple assumption: certain grasses, known as C4 plants, were largely indifferent to rising carbon dioxide levels. These plants, which include maize, sugarcane, and the...
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329Science
Green crabs rebranded from pest to New England delicacy
For generations, the European green crab has been the ocean's unwanted guest along New England's shores. The creature arrived centuries ago, hidden in the ballast water of ships crossing from Europe. It found a...
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330Science
COVID Summer Wave Explained by Four Predictable Factors
The simplest explanation for a summer COVID 19 surge is almost always the wrong one. When temperatures climb and cases rise with them, the public tends to reach for two opposite conclusions: either the virus has become...
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331Science
Quantum states live in Hilbert space
In the mid 1920s, physics faced a remarkable dilemma. Two brilliant minds, working almost simultaneously, had produced two radically different descriptions of the same microscopic world. Werner Heisenberg, in 1925,...
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332Science
SSRIs healing power remains scientifically unexplained
Every year, millions of people begin a medication whose healing power remains scientifically unexplained. They take it for a condition no laboratory test can confirm. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs,...
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333Science
The Rise and Fall of Britains Scientific Civil Service
In the early 1980s, a BBC film crew boarded a Westland Sea King helicopter with a young woman named Susan James. She was taking noise measurements mid flight, a task that would later lead her to process the data in an...
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334Science
Optical Tornadoes Created with Liquid Crystals
For years, scientists seeking to make light twist like a whirlwind relied on increasingly complicated machinery. They carved intricate patterns into surfaces at the nanoscale and assembled bulky optical tables with...
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335Science
Monkeys Turn to Hunting When Fruit Runs Low
Most people picture monkeys eating fruit, leaves, or snatching a tourist's snack. Few imagine them stalking lizards or swallowing snakes whole. Yet for one group of primates in northeastern Brazil, this predatory...
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336Science
Male hormones suppress asthma nerve activity in lungs
For years, researchers could only infer how sex hormones influence asthma by observing that the condition presents differently in men and women. The underlying mechanism remained hidden, a black box of cellular...
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