World

Room to breathe: Reinventing urban design to withstand future pandemics

World / /

The idea of transforming cities into ideal, or even relatively effective, urban spaces that accommodate physical distancing and large fluctuations in public behavior can seem overwhelming, especially in the tumultuous wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. This task, as a whole, is enormous on an economic, political, and social level, with an innumerable amount of moving […]

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The World’s Golden Drink

World / /

It sits in a perfectly organized row within many supermarkets today: kombucha, the world’s golden health drink. Its bright, aesthetic labels pull in consumers, but the promises of amazing benefits keeps them hooked. These claims may explain the drink’s ubiquity in the modern day—from being on tap at startup companies to bottled in the refrigerators

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Food For Our Future

Environment, World / /

810 miles south of the North Pole, 390 feet deep inside Platåberget Mountain, lay 490 million seeds waiting to be planted. At the world’s northernmost airport, there sits only one destination: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Formed in collaboration with the Norwegian government and international non-profit The Crop Trust, the seed vault is a preventative

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The Defeat of Olympians: How Olympic Venues Impact Surrounding Environments

Environment, World / /

Source: Pixabay As Tokyo prepares to host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, the city plans to spend $25 billion to accommodate 33 sports and an estimated nine million attendees. Arenas will be filled with national pride, traditional ceremonies, and lifelong achievements — but what happens to the fame and fortune once the Olympic flame is extinguished? For

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She was Abel: Karen Uhlenbeck is the first woman to receive prestigious math award

World / /

Source: Wikimedia Commons This article was originally published as part of our Summer 2019 series. Only 52 of 935 Nobel Prizes have been awarded to women. Only one woman has won the Abel Prize since its founding in 2003. This year, Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck was awarded the title of the 2019 Abel Prize Laureate for

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The Science of Soap Bubbles

Technology, World / /

Bubbles are the subject of fascination for young children and legendary physicists alike; though pretty to observe, they also offer intriguing lessons in fluid dynamics. Looking closely at the surface of a soap bubble, a shimmering, iridescent surface swirling with activity can be observed. These mesmerizing patterns are due to the Marangoni effect. This phenomenon

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Hubble trouble, and make it double: Disagreement over one of the universe’s most important constants

Space, World / /

In the beginning, all that would become the universe was concentrated into an extremely small, dense, high-energy speck of space. In the fractions of seconds that followed, this singularity exploded: one hundred decillionths (10–35) of a second after, it expanded to nearly the size of a soccer ball; after one nonillionth (10–30) of a second,

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Black Holes in a Bathtub? How Scientists are Using Water Vortices to Study Black Holes

Space, World / /

How do you conduct a laboratory experiment when your subject can be as wide as 400 AU and as massive as ten billion suns? An international team of scientists at the Black Hole Laboratory at the University of Nottingham faced this question in their study of black holes. Their solution was to simulate a rotating

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