Pencil-beaked shorebirds with the ability to stay airborne for a week — flying all the way from Alaska to New Zealand — rely on a few crescents of mudflat to fuel that incredible journey. Scientists recently found that almost the entire population of bar-tailed godwits that breed in Alaska fatten up on clams and worms […]
In a cavernous room within the university’s new engineering building, a bus squats on four flat tires. In this place, the 1946 International Harvester model K-5 looks small, for maybe the first time in its eventful existence. Not long after World War II, those black tires crunched the gravel of the new Alaska Highway during […]
Charles Deehr will never forget his first red aurora. On Feb. 11, 1958, Deehr was a student at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He asked a Fulbright student from Norway named Tone to the Portland Symphony that night. They went for a stroll on a golf course after the concert. Looking past the treetops, they […]
About once every other week for as long as you have been alive, zooming space rocks have penetrated the shell of gases surrounding our blue planet. If you happened to be in the right spot and were looking up, you might have seen a fireball in the sky, caused by a supersonic space rock encountering […]