Posts

The Thomas Fire spread through the hills above Ventura, in the northern greater Los Angeles megalopolis, with the speed of a hurricane. Driven by 50 mph Santa Ana winds—bone-dry katabatic air moving at freeway speeds out of the Mojave desert—the fire transformed overnight from a 5,000-acre burn in a charming chaparral-lined canyon to an inferno […]

Most mornings when I step out of my San Francisco apartment, I hear the waves, the seagulls, and occasionally kids yelling out the window across the street. But over the past few weeks, the murmur of Ocean Beach has been cut with a low mechanistic rumble. Walk a few blocks and pop your head over […]

Are superheroes real? Maybe. In this recently released video, a firefighter in Latvia catches a man falling past a window. Let me tell you something. I have a fairly reasonable understanding of physics and this catch looks close to being impossible—but it's real. Here is the situation (as far as I can tell). A dude […]

This past year, 2017, was the worst fire season in American history. Over 9.5 million acres burned across North America. Firefighting efforts cost $2 billion. This past year, 2017, was the seventh-worst Atlantic hurricane season on record and the worst since 2005. There were six major storms. Early estimates put the costs at more than […]

Today, during a World Cup game between Morocco and Iran, Moroccan winger Nordin Amrabat suffered a wicked head injury when he collided with an opponent. After he went down, a team trainer tried to revive him by slapping his face—a move decried by athletes and followers online. But despite the frequency of those kinds of […]

Kelly Brunt won’t be home for the holidays, nor will she be ringing in the New Year at a fabulous party or watching Ryan Seacrest schmooze B-list celebrities on TV. Instead, between December 21 and January 11, she’ll be leading a four-person expedition around the South Pole, sleeping in a small tent mounted on a […]

Next month, in a laboratory an hour outside of London, scientists will begin stitching bits of DNA together and inserting them into hundreds of tiny, cucumber-shaped insect eggs. It’s the first step toward engineering a new kind of mosquito—the kind that could help eradicate malaria on this side of the Prime Meridian. The mosquito is […]

Over the past century, scientists have become adept at plotting the ecological interactions of the diverse organisms that populate the planet’s forests, plains and seas. They have established powerful mathematical techniques to describe systems ranging from the carbon cycles driven by plants to the predator-prey dynamics that dictate the behavior of lions and gazelles. Understanding […]

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died in December of 2017; the election to replace him was Tuesday. No one knows who won. Partially that’s because the votes are still trickling in. Mail-in ballots merely had to be postmarked by election day, and as I write the city is reporting 87,000 votes yet to be processed. […]

On July 1, 2013, Amos Joseph Wells III went to his pregnant girlfriend's home in Fort Worth, Texas, and shot her multiple times in the head and stomach. He then killed her mother and her 10-year-old brother. Wells surrendered voluntarily within hours, and in a tearful jailhouse interview told reporters, "There's no explanation that I […]