Article archive
Published news and blog articles, organized by category. Browse older coverage by month or search for a topic. Undated blog guides appear after dated news.
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The Science of Plate Tectonics
The Science of Plate Tectonics | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 105 N43 ANALYSIS · GEOLOGY The Science of Plate Tectonics Earth's outer shell is not static. It is fractured into more than a dozen rigid plates that drift, collide, and split apart…
The Yangtze River and Three Gorges Dam
The Yangtze River and Three Gorges Dam | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 179 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Yangtze River and Three Gorges Dam The Three Gorges Dam is one of the largest interventions ever made in a river. It generates electricity and…
How the Rhine Shaped European Trade
How the Rhine Shaped European Trade | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 178 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD How the Rhine Shaped European Trade The Rhine connected Alpine water, German industry, Dutch ports, and the markets of Europe. Its trade history is a…
The Mississippi and Its Floods
The Mississippi and Its Floods | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 177 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Mississippi and Its Floods The Mississippi is not merely a river that occasionally overflows. It is a continent-scale drainage system whose floods…
The Eruption of Krakatoa
The Eruption of Krakatoa | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 155 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Eruption of Krakatoa In August 1883, the volcanic island of Krakatoa tore itself apart in the loudest sound ever recorded, generating tsunamis that killed…
How Pompeii Was Destroyed
How Pompeii Was Destroyed | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 154 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD How Pompeii Was Destroyed In the autumn of 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted with apocalyptic force, burying a thriving Roman city under volcanic ash and preserving…
How the Spanish Flu Spread
How the Spanish Flu Spread | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 152 N43 ANALYSIS · HISTORY How the Spanish Flu Spread In 1918, a world locked in the trenches of the Great War faced an invisible enemy that killed more people in 18 months than four…
The Black Death and Its Impact
The Black Death and Its Impact | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 151 N43 ANALYSIS · HISTORY The Black Death and Its Impact Between 1346 and 1353, a plague pandemic killed up to 50 million people — half the population of Europe. The bacterium…
How the Great Fire of London Spread
How the Great Fire of London Spread | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 150 N43 ANALYSIS · HISTORY How the Great Fire of London Spread A single bakery oven on Pudding Lane ignited a conflagration that consumed 13,200 houses, 87 churches, and most…
The Construction of Notre-Dame
The Construction of Notre-Dame | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 147 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Construction of Notre-Dame The eight-century building campaign that produced Notre-Dame de Paris — from the first stone laid in the 1160s through the…
How the Terracotta Army Was Made
How the Terracotta Army Was Made | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 140 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD How the Terracotta Army Was Made Over 8,000 life-sized clay warriors, each with a unique face, were buried with China's first emperor to guard him in the…
The Apollo Moon Landings
The Apollo Moon Landings | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 129 N43 ANALYSIS · SPACEFLIGHT The Apollo Moon Landings Six crewed missions landed twelve humans on the Moon between 1969 and 1972 — the most ambitious feat of exploration in human…
The Kuiper Belt and Beyond
The Kuiper Belt and Beyond | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 127 N43 ANALYSIS · SOLAR SYSTEM The Kuiper Belt and Beyond From the discovery of Pluto to the New Horizons flyby and the scattered disc beyond Neptune, the outer Solar System's frozen…
The Rings of Saturn
The Rings of Saturn | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 123 N43 ANALYSIS · PLANETARY SCIENCE The Rings of Saturn Saturn's rings are the most spectacular ring system in the solar system — billions of particles of ice and rock, from grains of dust to…
How Jupiter's Great Red Spot Works
How Jupiter's Great Red Spot Works | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 122 N43 ANALYSIS · PLANETARY SCIENCE How Jupiter's Great Red Spot Works The largest storm in the solar system has churned for centuries. NASA's Juno mission and centuries of…
The Exploration of Venus
The Exploration of Venus | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 121 N43 ANALYSIS · PLANETARY SCIENCE The Exploration of Venus From early telescopic observations to Soviet landers and modern radar mapping, humanity's efforts to probe the hottest planet…
The Science of Solar Eclipses
The Science of Solar Eclipses | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 119 N43 ANALYSIS · ASTRONOMY The Science of Solar Eclipses A cosmic coincidence of geometry makes the Moon appear exactly the same size as the Sun from Earth. When their paths cross,…
The Science of El Nino
The Science of El Nino | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 095 N43 ANALYSIS · CLIMATE SCIENCE The Science of El Nino A warming patch of the tropical Pacific Ocean that reshapes weather on every continent — droughts in Australia, floods in Peru,…
The Science of Lightning
The Science of Lightning | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 089 N43 ANALYSIS · PHYSICS The Science of Lightning The electrostatic physics of lightning — from charge separation in thunderclouds to the 30,000 °C plasma channel that splits the sky,…
How the Viking Longships Sailed
How the Viking Longships Sailed | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 146 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD How the Viking Longships Sailed The slender, clinker-built warship that carried Norse raiders, traders, and settlers across the Atlantic, the North Sea,…
The Great Zimbabwe Ruins
The Great Zimbabwe Ruins | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 143 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Great Zimbabwe Ruins Sprawling across 7.2 square kilometers of southeastern African hills, Great Zimbabwe is the largest stone structure in precolonial…
The Nazca Lines of Peru
The Nazca Lines of Peru | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 139 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Nazca Lines of Peru Etched into one of Earth's driest deserts, hundreds of giant figures — hummingbirds, monkeys, spiders, and geometric grids — have survived…
The Petra Rock-Cut City
The Petra Rock-Cut City | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 145 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD The Petra Rock-Cut City How a nomadic desert people carved a thriving metropolis into rose-red sandstone cliffs, engineered desert water systems that sustained…
How Machu Picchu Was Built
How Machu Picchu Was Built | N43 N43 ANALYSIS WORLD · 142 N43 ANALYSIS · WORLD How Machu Picchu Was Built Perched on a razor-thin ridge 2,430 meters above the Urubamba River, the 15th-century Inca citadel of Machu Picchu is an engineering…
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