英語で読む日経サイエンス

Wadi Lawayni is a remote desert valley in the interior Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, east of Saudi Arabia. A visitor gets there by following a lonely dirt road that dwindles to tire tracks running throu … 続きを読む →

Lee Reeves always wanted to be a veterinarian. When he was in high school in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, he went to an animal hospital near his house on a busy Saturday morning to apply for a job. … 続きを読む →

As Douglas Adams wrote in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Space is big.... You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.” We and many other astronomers … 続きを読む →

Late on a Friday night in April 2020, Lexi Walls was alone in her laboratory at the University of Washington, waiting nervously for the results of the most important experiment of her life. Walls, a y … 続きを読む →

In 1655 Dutch astronomer Christiaan Huygens set up a refractor telescope of his own construction and aimed it at Saturn. He thought the planet was encircled by a single solid ring and planned to obser … 続きを読む →

In 2010 scientists from the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) sailed into the South Pacific Gyre, a marine desert more barren than all but the most arid places on Earth. Near the center of the … 続きを読む →

The far side of the moon is a strange and wild region, quite different from the familiar and mostly smooth face we see nightly from our planet. In 1959 the Soviet Luna 3 space probe took the first pho … 続きを読む →

The fading sun beat down on our backs after an already long day in the field. Exhausted, we toiled over shovels and dug with our bare hands to clear away the sand. We were in the heart of dinosaur cou … 続きを読む →

The Konya Plain in central Turkey is a vast, elevated plateau covered in small farms and dusty fields, edged by dramatic mountain ranges that cast purple shadows. At night, visitors can drive into the … 続きを読む →

Just like trees, people and stars, galaxies have life cycles. A galaxy is born when enough gas and stars coalesce to form a coherent structure—perhaps it starts as one cloud of gas and slowly gather … 続きを読む →

On September 9, 2018, a robotic telescope on its routine patrol of the night sky detected what looked like a new star. Over the next few hours, the “star” grew 10 times brighter, triggering a flag … 続きを読む →

At this very instant, in backyards and forests across the eastern U.S., one of nature’s greatest spectacles is underway. Although it may lack the epic majesty of the wildebeest migration in the Sere … 続きを読む →

In 1924 Encyclopædia Britannica published a two-volume ­history of the 20th century up to that point. More than 80 authors—professors and politicians, soldiers and scientists—contributed chapter … 続きを読む →

The toaster-sized capsule hit our atmosphere at 12 kilometers per second, enduring temperatures of 3,000 degrees Celsius during its fiery descent before deploying a parachute to slow its velocity. It … 続きを読む →

In 541 C.E., after years of campaigning against Goths and Vandals, Emperor Justinian I had built the eastern Roman Empire into a vast dominion, nearly encircling the Mediterranean Sea. That year, howe … 続きを読む →