In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places in the United States to study sharks in a rigorous way. Spielberg was developing a character who was...

The history of astronomy has hinged on radical ideas that transformed our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. The most obvious of these may be  the discovery in the 16th century that the Earth and other planets orbit the sun. An unpopular idea when it was first proposed, today it is so fundamental to basic astronomy it is practically taken...

On a Wednesday in February 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar—a rangy, soft-spoken steam engineer, who had turned 40 just the week before—stood before a group of leading scientists, members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society. He had a bold idea to share: Humans’ burning of fuel was making the planet warmer.By Callendar’s calculations, over...

Jules Evans was 17 years old when he had his first unpleasant run-in with psychedelic drugs. Caught up in the heady rave culture that gripped ’90s London, he took some acid at a club one night and followed a herd of unknown faces to an afterparty. There, he found himself pursued by a single thought, which followed him like a hunter’s sights: He was...

In the fall of 2020, I installed a municipal clock in Anchorage, Alaska. Although my clock was digital, it soon deviated from other timekeeping devices. Within a matter of days, the clock was hours ahead of the smartphones in people’s pockets. People figured something was awry.But the clock wasn’t defective. It was just unconventionally regulated: I...

Inside every rechargeable battery—in electric cars and phones and robot vacuums—lurks a cosmic mystery. The lithium that we use to power much of our lives these days is so common as to seem almost prosaic. But this element turns out to be a wild card, a rebel that’s been challenging our most basic understanding of the formation of the universe itself. Beyond...