Issues

Data from a global network of seismometers were available within minutes of last December’s Sumatran earthquake. Constructing a detailed, self-consistent picture of where, when, how fast, and how much the sea floor moved has taken months.

Generating and detecting x rays in the strong fields used for magnetic resonance is difficult, but it can be done.

Preserving starlit nights in the face of ever-growing light use is a balancing act that proponents of dark skies approach with education, better light fixtures, and legislation.

With science museums finding an increasingly important source of revenue in their IMAX theaters, some museums are yielding to anti-evolution sentiment and not showing controversial films.

And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

And the helmets are shaking their purple-dyed crests, and for the wearers of breast-plates the weavers are striking up the wise shuttle’s songs, that wakes up those who are asleep.

Scientific curiosity and societal utility both call for a robust understanding of the Sun-Earth system. Changes—even small ones—in the energy flowing from the Sun can have widespread effects, from climate change to disruptions in satellite communications.

Isomers are set apart from other nuclear excitations by their long half-lives. That longevity facilitates the study of nuclear structure and astrophysics, and it suggests a variety of practical applications.

In this 1950 speech to the International Congress of Surgeons in Cleveland, Ohio, Einstein argued that the 19th-century physicists’ simplistic view of nature, illusory as it was, gave biologists the confidence to treat life as a purely physical phenomenon.

Publicly available data reveal long-term systematic features about citation statistics and how papers are referenced. The data also tell fascinating citation histories of individual articles.