Each year, unfathomable amounts of energy are added to the oceans. Scientists measure heat in joules; the amount of heat in the oceans is so large that we report it in zettajoules. What is a zettajoule? It is 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 joules. The amount of heat we are putting into the oceans is equivalent to about five...Read More

his is the story of a man who couldn’t see numbers. After suffering from a rare degenerative brain disorder, a man was unable to see and identify the numerical digits 2 to 9. If he was presented with a picture of the digit 8 and asked to illustrate what he saw, he drew a scrambled...Read More

Mangroves provide protection for coasts against extreme weather. While they may protect shorelines from cyclones, how does a hit from a hurricane affect the mangroves? The literature has been surveyed by Ken Krauss and Michael Osland in a new paper Tropical cyclones and the organization of mangrove forests: a review. A Bruguiera gymnorrhiza forest at the mouth of...Read More

By then, most cosmologists had concluded that the universe contains much more than meets the eye. Observations of pinwheeling galaxies suggested that scaffolds of invisible matter held their stars together, while a repulsive form of energy drove galaxies apart. To learn more, Bennett and his Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) team had spent a year...Read More