Tag: extreme temperatures
The Quest to Build a Better Birdhouse
This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely
What Will It Mean to Drive an EV in a More Extreme Climate?
Every Texan I know has what you might call “grid anxiety,” a low-humming preoccupation with electricity that emerged after brutal winter storms kneecapped the state’s isolated power grid in February 2021. That frigid disaster triggered highway pileups and runs on grocery stores; people inadvertently poisoned themselves with carbon monoxide by running grills and cars indoors to keep warm. My hometown of San Antonio, like so many places across the state, simply wasn’t equipped to deal with several days of freezing
The Best Poetry Collections to Read Again and Again
As editors who review poetry for The Atlantic, we read a lot of poems. Each week, there are new PDFs in our inboxes; our desks are covered with chaotic piles of books we’ve yet to crack open, and our shelves are already packed with old favorites. We’re also frequently asked, “What poetry should I read?” The question couldn’t be more reasonable, but embarrassingly, it tends to make our minds go blank. There are a trillion different collections for every mood:
Is America Ready for a New Age of Nuclear Power?
“WE WERE A BIT CRAZY”
Kairos Power’s new test facility is on a parched site a few miles south of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, airport. Around it, desert stretches toward hazy mountains on the horizon. The building looks like a factory or a warehouse; nothing about it betrays the moonshot exercise happening within. There, digital readouts count down the minutes, T-minus style, until power begins flowing to a test unit simulating the blistering heat of a new kind of nuclear