What Rice-Farming Cultures Can Teach Us about Pandemic Preparedness
Rice farming is hard. It’s complicated. Traditional rice farming takes twice the amount of labor as crops like wheat, corn and potatoes. Paddy rice was built on irrigation networks that forced farmers to cooperate with each other. Rain falls on the fields of both rogue and cooperative wheat farmers, but irrigation networks flood paddy fields
All the Gold in the Universe Was (Likely) Created This Way
For a long time, no one knew how “heavy metals” formed—or showed up on Earth. Now some new evidence finally points the way to an answer.TRANSCRIPT That ring on your finger made of platinum or gold contains a secret that has been at the center of a cosmic mystery. Scientists have been combing the galaxy to figure out where
This Spiritual Tradition Could Be the Most Poetic Bereavement Therapy Ever Documented
At the core of religious wonder lies the mystery of life and death, and the world contains more understandings of this mystery than we can ever know. When I first stayed with the Sora Indigenous (or Adivasi) people in the highlands of Odisha, eastern India, as a graduate student in the 1970s, they engaged daily
Audio Astronomy Unlocks a Universe of Sound
Ever since she was a kid, Sarah Kane has wanted to study space. And she’s well on her way. Now a senior undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, Kane has spent the past two years analyzing the cosmos using machine learning. There’s one small problem: astronomy is a highly visual field, and Kane is
Volcanic Activity on Mars Upends Red Planet Assumptions
For decades, planetary scientists assumed Mars was dead. Geologically, that is. Smaller than Earth, the planet would have cooled faster than ours after it formed. It was, for a time, quite volcanically active. However, as the thinking goes, when the interior temperature gradually dropped, so too did the planet’s ability to generate large-scale geologic activity—such
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