A fire in a chemical factory in Karachi, Pakistan, on 27 August has left at least 17 workers dead. According to local and international news reporting, the fire broke out on the ground floor of the three-storey building, which had only one entrance and exit. Many of the windows – as well as the roof […]

Cascading carelesslypast weathered oreyou slither into viewagainst the levee’s edge.Sparkling waters thatblister in the warming sun,their see-through huesa deceitful abstractionfor what lies beneath.Refracted in the scattered lightyour provenance unwinds,as the filthy dischargeof a thousanddiscarded cell phonesdrifts downstream.The rarity of extractiontempered by theubiquity of release. Snake River near Keystone, Colorado, USA (Image Credit: K.warterbeck via Wikimedia […]

Naval War College and Extension School instructor traces trend of American entitlement, nihilism One of the biggest threats to American democracy right now isn’t nuclear war or terrorism, but the growing narcissism and nihilism of the public, says Tom Nichols. Nichols, an instructor at Harvard Extension School and the U.S. Naval War College, recently released “Our Own […]

Researchers at the University of Cambridge have combined reconstructions of the Earth’s changing surface elevations over the past three million years with data on climate change over this timeframe, and with bird and mammal species’ locations. Their results reveal how species evolved into new ones as land elevation changed – and disentangle the effects of […]

New experiments using trapped one-dimensional gases — atoms cooled to the coldest temperatures in the universe and confined so that they can only move in a line — fit with the predictions of the recently developed theory of “generalized hydrodynamics.” Quantum mechanics is necessary to describe the novel properties of these gases. Achieving a better […]

In July, a 16-year-old lifeguard penned a note to the Washington Postopen in new window detailing how she and another girl were being paid less than the teenage boys they worked with. Two weeks earlier, the University of Oregon paid $450,000 to settle a lawsuitopen in new window filed by a psychology professor who’d found out she was being paid […]

Anyone who has watched a child face a doctor with a needle knows how stressful those moments can be for all involved. For children with serious medical conditions undergoing frequent procedures like blood draws and catheter placements, the ongoing anxiety and fear can take a toll. Now, a study published in JAMA Network Open shows that virtual […]

Using digital technology, a researcher has unravelled the secrets of the use of perspective by the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck, a technique previously believed to be specific to the Italian Renaissance artists. The history of lines is anything but linear. The importance of proportions and depth in artistic representation has fluctuated widely from one […]

In 2017, a particularly luminous and unusual source of radio waves was discovered in data taken by the Very Large Array (VLA) Sky Survey, a project that scans the night sky in radio wavelengths. Now, led by Caltech graduate student Dillon Dong (MS ’18), a team of astronomers has established that the bright radio flare […]

The National Institutes of Health is awarding seven projects a total of $18.15 million over five years to a new effort focused on interoception—the ways in which organisms sense and regulate signals within their bodies. Interoception is not well understood and is a new area of research focus for NIH. This coordinated effort, which involves […]