Water World
September 2026
Every article published in September 2026. 35 articles · Back to full archive
Nukewars
Why did closing a Cold War-era Air Force base on the shore of a Great Lakes peninsula in the 1990s trigger the return of nesting piping plovers to beaches that had not seen a chick fledge in decades?
Super Computers
Training compute for notable AI models is doubling roughly every five months, dataset sizes for large language models every eight months, and the electrical power required to train them roughly every year, according to Stanford's 2025 AI Index
Climate Science
In 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington devastated 230 square miles of forest and buried the North Fork Toutle valley in debris, and ecologists tracking the blast zone since have watched pocket gophers, lupines and returning elk shape recovery across areas left to natural succession
Uncategorized
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, discovered over Chile in July 2025, may be more than 7.6 billion years old — roughly 3 billion years older than our solar system — and its speed and trajectory suggest it came from the Milky Way’s ancient thick-disk population, making it a possible relic of a planetary system that formed billions of years before ours
Climate Science
How does breaching a dike and removing a tide gate on a Pacific Northwest estuary let salt water back into diked pasture and bring juvenile salmon and sculpins into fields that had grown hay for decades?
Flora And Fauna
Sandhill cranes stage on Nebraska's Platte River each March in flocks approaching 1 million birds, roosting shoulder to shoulder on shallow sandbars the river only maintains because upstream irrigation withdrawals stop short of erasing its braided channel
Flora And Fauna
Manatees in Florida's Crystal River gather by the hundreds each winter around freshwater springs that stay at a constant 72 degrees Fahrenheit, a thermal refuge that protects them from potentially fatal cold stress when Gulf water falls below 68 degrees
Flora And Fauna
In 2014 cameras began counting animals on I-90's Snoqualmie Pass East crossings; by July 2026 the overcrossing alone logged its 10,000th crossing, with nearly 40,000 across all 12 structures
Earth
Alligators in Florida's Everglades dig depressions through muck and peat, often down to the limestone bed, during the dry season, and the water-filled holes they maintain concentrate fish, turtles and wading birds so densely that ecologists count them as critical dry-season refuges across the southern marsh
Flora And Fauna
Beginning in 1982, 28 Asiatic wild asses were released into the Negev, with 10 more in 1992–93; the population took hold and now spreads acacia seeds through its dung
Uncategorized
The EU changed the design of billions of everyday drink containers by requiring their plastic caps to stay attached — loose caps were turning up in nature two to three times more often than the bottles themselves
Constellations
SN 1987A exploded 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud and was first spotted from Earth in February 1987; nearly four decades later, the James Webb Space Telescope has finally caught evidence of high-energy emission from what appears to be the neutron star left at its core
Flora And Fauna
In 2011, a male wolf known as OR-7 walked from northeastern Oregon into California, becoming the first confirmed wild wolf in the state since 1924, and his descendants now form breeding packs in Siskiyou and Lassen counties more than a century after the species was extirpated
Uncategorized
Off Hawaii, warm surface water sits above ocean water roughly 20°C colder, enough of a temperature difference to run a heat engine — engineers first generated net electricity from that contrast there in 1979
Water World