Tag: American scientists
Christopher Nolan on the Promise and Peril of Technology
By the time I sat down with Christopher Nolan in his posh hotel suite not far from the White House, I guessed that he was tired of Washington, D.C. The day before, he’d toured the Oval Office and had lunch on Capitol Hill. Later that night, I’d watched him receive an award from the Federation for American Scientists, an organization that counts Robert Oppenheimer, the subject of Nolan’s most recent film, among its founders. Onstage, he’d briefly jousted with Republican
Oppenheimer’s Cry of Despair in The Atlantic
In February of 1949, J. Robert Oppenheimer, the former director of Los Alamos Laboratory under the Manhattan Project, took to the pages of this magazine to write about a terrible defeat. Nearly four years had passed since the Manhattan Project had detonated the first atomic bomb in New Mexico. The explosion had flashed purple light onto the surrounding mountains and raised a 40,000-foot pillar of flame, smoke, and debris from the desert floor. But for Oppenheimer, the afterglow had quickly
Bird flu is already a tragedy
It was late fall of 2022 when David Stallknecht heard that bodies were raining from the sky.
Stallknecht, a wildlife biologist at the University of Georgia, was already fearing the worst. For months, wood ducks had been washing up on shorelines; black vultures had been teetering out of tree tops. But now thousands of ghostly white snow-goose carcasses were strewn across agricultural fields in Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. The birds had tried to take flight, only to plunge back to
Rip Currents Don’t Have to Be So Deadly
This article was originally published in Hakai Magazine.
On a sweltering day in July 2019, Summer Locknick plodded along Cavendish Beach on the coast of Canada’s Prince Edward Island, among hundreds of people lounging on the red-tinted sand. The air smelled of sunscreen as the visitors worked on their tans, blew up inflatable rafts, and cooled off in the sea. Locknick, however, was not there to relax. With a GPS unit and a tablet in hand, she circulated in the
Why Is the Pandemic So Bad in Florida?
The numbers are remarkable. More than 100 million people in the United States have likely been infected by SARS-CoV-2 and 167 million people are fully vaccinated. Yet despite this huge population of people with at least some level of immunity, the Delta variant has sent case and hospitalization numbers soaring. Florida is on its way to having twice as many people hospitalized now than during any previous wave, when essentially no one was vaccinated.
One way to think about it,