Science X Dialog

We usually think of auroras as beautiful lights in the night sky. I see them as visible traces of a connection between the sun, Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. This led me to an origin-of-life question: Could the ...

A few years ago, I drove with an old friend from Togo, West Africa, towards the country's last remaining large protected area, Fazao-Malfakassa National Park. Our destination was the Hotel Fazao, where his uncle had once ...

In 1974, Stephen Hawking made a prediction that transformed our understanding of black holes. Black holes, he showed, are not truly black: They slowly lose energy through a quantum process now known as Hawking radiation. ...

Steel pipelines used for oil and gas transportation remain the backbone of energy infrastructure. Hence, there is heavy focus on their integrity and resistance to degradation in corrosive conditions. Sour corrosion, a dangerous ...

When we think about metabolism, we usually ask, "What did I eat? How much sugar, fat or protein was in the meal?" But through our research, we have become interested in another question: "When did I eat it?" This matters ...

What happens when a superconductor becomes so thin that electrons can no longer behave as if they were moving through an ordinary three-dimensional piece of metal? This question has been at the center of my recent work on ...

Have you ever walked across a salt flat so expansive it feels like another planet? That's what it's like standing in Egypt's coastal sabkhas—those otherworldly landscapes where the ground crunches beneath your feet and the ...

One of the central ideas in modern physics is the phase transition—a sudden transformation of the state of a material. We encounter phase transitions throughout everyday life: water freezes into ice, wax melts in the warmth ...

Despite the importance and dominance of angiosperms ("flowering plants") in the current ecosystem, it is rather surprising that we know so little about their origin and early evolution. Paleobotanists have been making efforts ...

Gold has been the safe choice for perovskite solar cells. We found a way to stop needing it.

In a new study in Environmental Research: Ecology, I analyzed how fires were able to burn into communities and how fire-resistant land uses could be combined with fuel treatments to reduce fires burning into communities. ...

Tall trees are generally associated with high-biomass forests. This is particularly true for forests dominated by Sequoia sempervirens (hereafter redwood), the world's tallest tree species. Extreme decay resistance, the ability ...