Why a puffy cloud can have such a straight bottom
Follow warm air upward to see how condensation creates a roughly level cloud base—and how drier air helps shape the fluffy edges above it.
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How corals build thriving reefs in nutrient-poor water
Coral animals share their tissues with sunlight-powered partners. Follow the exchange to see how it supports reef growth—and what bleaching interrupts.
Free reads
The animal that edits its own skin.
A disappearing octopus is doing several jobs at once: resizing patches of pigment, working with reflected light and reshaping the surface of its body.
Glass is not another word for clear.
A diamond and a window can both let you see through them. That tells you surprisingly little about how their atoms are arranged.
A grain of sky. Thousands of galaxies.
Historical edition · July 2022. Webb’s first deep field is a crowded view, a record of old light and a demonstration of how instruments turn measurements into an image.
Before the beater falls.
A Han entertainer's raised hand gives us a place to look—and a reason to leave the lost performance open.
Before blue was a colour, it was a journey.
A blue robe can hold a mineral’s history, a painter’s technique and evidence too small to see from the gallery floor. Start with Raphael’s Ansidei Madonna.
Earth made a mixtape. Then sent it away.
The 1977 Voyager Golden Record joins an impossible editorial brief with a practical engineering problem: choose a planet’s introduction, then explain how a stranger might play it.