Where Science Meets Fiction
Right now, something is moving through this page. Through the screen, through the table it rests on, through the floor beneath that, and through the ground below the building. Dark matter, the invisible gravitationally active mass that holds galaxies together, streams through ordinary matter at roughly 220 kilometers per second relative to the galactic center,…
In Ulaanbaatar in January, the temperature drops to minus thirty Celsius and the city burns coal. Not just in power plants. The ger districts, traditional felt-tent neighborhoods covering a third of the city, run individual household stoves through the night because stopping means freezing. The smoke has nowhere to go. A thermal inversion layer, cold…
In 2018, the city of Shenzhen finished something no city had managed before. Its public bus fleet, all 16,359 vehicles, had completed a full transition to electric power. Every bus leaving the Longhua depot each morning did so without a combustion event. The fleet covered roughly 1.2 billion kilometres annually and had previously been one…
On September 14, 2015, two mirrors at LIGO – each suspended on glass fibers inside a four-kilometer evacuated tube – moved relative to each other by approximately one-thousandth the diameter of a proton. The displacement lasted under a second. It was caused by two black holes that merged 1.3 billion light-years away, releasing in that…
In 1997, a physicist named Steve Lamoreaux placed two metal plates inside a vacuum chamber, separated them by less than a micrometer, and measured the force between them. The plates were uncharged. The space between them was as empty as any space on Earth can be made. The force they felt had no business existing…
A single liter of seawater collected from the North Pacific Gyre contains, on average, six times more microplastic particles than plankton by count. The ratio inverted sometime in the mid-1990s and has been moving in the wrong direction since. No net, no pump, no ship-based filtration system can meaningfully address particles smaller than 5 millimeters…
Bitterfeld-Wolfen sits in the Saxony-Anhalt region of eastern Germany. For most of the twentieth century it was one of the most productive chemical manufacturing zones in Europe, producing dyes, pesticides, chlorinated solvents, and plastics at industrial scale. By the 1990s it was also one of the most contaminated places on the continent. Chlorinated compounds, heavy…
Eight million tonnes of plastic enter the ocean every year. The organisms that have lived in that ocean for three billion years are, in a specific biochemical sense, already synthesizing the answer. Certain microalgae produce polyhydroxyalkanoates – PHAs – as a routine metabolic function: long-chain polymer molecules with properties that chemists classify as biodegradable thermoplastics….
There is a yogurt container sitting somewhere in the Pacific right now. It has been there roughly forty years. The yogurt lasted about a week. The container will outlast every person alive today by several centuries – not because anyone needed it to, but because nobody built in a way for it to stop. That…
A 2,000-tonne fermentation tank in Blair, Nebraska is filled with something that looks like thin gruel. Corn steep liquor, the aqueous slurry left after wet milling separates starch from the kernel, sits in the tank at 40 degrees Celsius while a carefully managed culture of Lactobacillus bacteria converts dissolved sugars into lactic acid. The process…
A person throwing a PET bottle into a waste bin in 2024 is, in most cases, postponing a decision rather than making one. The bottle will be sorted, maybe baled, possibly shipped across a continent, and in a meaningful fraction of cases will end up in a landfill or incinerator regardless. The chemistry that makes…
In the autumn of 2022, a procurement team at a Tier 1 automotive supplier in Stuttgart spent three weeks trying to replace a single part. The component was a structural bracket inside a door panel. It weighed 340 grams and was currently made from glass-fiber-reinforced polypropylene. The team had been asked to find a bio-based…
In Merseburg, a city in Saxony-Anhalt in central Germany, a facility operated by APK AG runs an unusual version of plastic processing. The mixed polyethylene films entering the plant are not melted and extruded, as conventional recycling does. They are dissolved. A purpose-designed solvent separates the polymer chains from their contaminants, isolates the pure material,…
There is a specific grade of gold used in semiconductor manufacturing. Five-nines purity – 99.999 percent – achieved through cascading refinery steps: ore extraction, electrolytic refining, zone melting. Each step costs energy and generates waste. That gold ends up bonded to a chip inside a device discarded in a few years. When it enters classical…
In 2007, a research team at UC Berkeley put a sample of green sulfur bacterium into a laser spectrometer and watched energy move through its photosynthetic machinery in real time. The bacteria had been collected from an anoxic sulfur spring. The experiment was designed to measure how quickly an absorbed photon transferred its energy from…
The monitoring station bolted to a traffic authority pole records whatever drifts its way at sensor height. At rush hour, the chemistry of the air three meters above the asphalt and the chemistry at sensor height are two different readings from the same event. One of them gets logged. The other one is what people…