Author: Crop Protection

One of the most potent radio telescope arrays ever built is located high in the northern Chilean Atacama Desert, where the air is so thin and dry that breathing requires some adjustment. The 66 antennas that make up the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, are dispersed over a plateau at a height of about 5,000 meters above sea level. They are fixed on the sky, listening for the universe’s faint chemical whispers. Astronomers were genuinely perplexed when those antennas locked onto an unusual object traveling through our solar system in late 2025: a comet that had traveled from another…

When you walk into the health section of any bookstore, the shelves still have a strong emphasis on control: timing meals, counting macros, maximizing eating windows, and avoiding entire food groups with the conviction of someone defusing a bomb. The diet industry, which is valued at hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide, has spent decades instilling in society the idea that your body cannot be trusted in the absence of a system. According to the intuitive eating framework, which was created in 1995 by two registered dietitians, the message is the issue rather than the fix. Additionally, it has been…

Most people thought Elon Musk’s October 2022 arrival at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters with a porcelain sink—a prop for a joke about “letting that sink in”—was the beginning of a chaotic, egotistical experiment. In the midst of the widespread layoffs, the drama surrounding the blue tick, and the steady exodus of advertisers, fewer people paid attention to what he truly claimed to want to build. not an improved social media network. Something much bigger. An app for everything. A social and financial framework for American life. At the time, it sounded like something a wealthy man would say when he…

Gaze down from the edge of a robust coral reef. The hues are truly striking: sea fans floating in a slow current, schools of fish passing through them like ribbons of light, and branching structures in orange and purple hues. A healthy coral reef has a higher density of life per square meter than practically any terrestrial ecosystem. The focus is on Amazon. For the majority of people who haven’t seen one, reefs continue to be an abstract concept—something from a nature documentary, something distant and vaguely tropical. Because of this distance, it has become easier to ignore what is…

Imagine a researcher waiting for a mosquito that doesn’t want to bite her at night while perched in a tree in Borneo. The mosquitoes she needs, the ones that favor monkeys over people, won’t approach. Living higher up in the forest canopy, they use techniques unrelated to human scent to track their primate hosts, and gathering them necessitates either waiting for larvae under trees or simply giving up and returning home. In the meantime, a different group of mosquitoes—the ones that have evolved over millions of years to find human blood irresistible—are following her whereabouts with what seems, in the…

In order to replicate lightning, Stanley Miller, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, set up a flask in 1953, filled it with methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water—the approximate chemical composition that scientists thought existed on the early Earth—and passed an electric current through it. A week later, amino acids were produced by the mixture. From nothing recognizable as life, the components of life had come together. Miller had created something in a laboratory that, in theory, seemed to be at the very limit of what science was meant to accomplish. The experiment gained notoriety. Then, for the better…

The majority of investors dismissed Western Digital’s announcement in February of last year that it was dividing into two distinct businesses as corporate housekeeping, which produces a brief flurry of analyst notes before being forgotten. In a world that seemed to be moving away from hard drives, Western Digital was a hard drive manufacturer. The flash memory company being spun off, SanDisk, was a storage brand that most people were familiar with from the tiny cards found in their digital cameras. There didn’t seem to be any clear momentum in either half of the split. SanDisk had increased by almost…

Weight-loss medications don’t have a proud past. Beginning in the 1940s, “rainbow diet pills” containing amphetamines and diuretics were marketed to American women with the air of a breakfast cereal. Let’s fast-forward to the 1990s and the emergence of fen-phen, a combination medication that caused significant weight loss as well as severe lung and heart damage in enough patients to lead to widespread legal action and an FDA withdrawal. Over the course of several decades, the pattern remained largely consistent: a medication shows promise, becomes widely prescribed, and then reveals a side effect profile that can range from problematic to…

It all began with an error. While pursuing her doctorate at the University of Guelph in Ontario in 2022, Sabrina Rondeau conducted research on the effects of pesticides on bumblebees in the winter. Her setup was simple: to replicate the cold, dark conditions of a natural burrow, queens were placed in refrigerated tubes filled with soil. Four of those tubes eventually had water seeping into them. The queens were completely immersed. When Rondeau came upon what must have appeared to be a botched experiment, she discovered something completely unexpected. The bees were still alive. sitting there, seemingly unfazed, underwater. One…

Imagine an 1864 Confederate POW camp. Because of the extreme overcrowding, each prisoner took up about the same amount of space as a grave, according to historians. Union soldiers subsisted on meager corn rations, and many of them perished from scurvy and dysentery as their bodies deteriorated in environments that were, by definition, meant to break people. The men who survived had obvious consequences, including reduced prospects, shortened life expectancies, and poor health. That is not shocking. Surprisingly, the damage didn’t end with the survivors, as researchers piecing together historical mortality records eventually found. Compared to the general population, their…