Events

Two photos from Caribbean islands that will probably never look this way again. Sandy Ground, St. Martin, February 2009: Playa Negra, Vieques, Puerto Rico, November 2016: I hope they can rebuild quickly.

It can get warm in Chicago in September, but not usually this warm. The forecast today calls for 34°C with a dewpoint above 21°C, the epitome of the worst July weather we get here. The culprits are the tropical systems currently destroying islands in the Atlantic. A dome of unseasonably warm air has stalled over the eastern US and Canada, because Jose and Maria are dumping energy into the air right off shore. So, today's temperatures will be 12°C above normal and will likely surpass the record 33°C set...

The Système International d'unités, also known as the Metric System, is the most widely-used system of measuring things in the known universe. Of the 7.57 billion people in the world, somewhere around 7.2 billion use SI. The laggards are almost all here in the United States. Sarah Kaplan, writing for the Washington Post Science Alert today, blames English privateers: In 1793, botanist and aristocrat Joseph Dombey set sail from Paris with two standards for the new "metric system": a rod that measured...

Hurricane Maria's eye passed directly over Vieques earlier this morning and has now struck Puerto Rico proper: Hurricane Maria roared ashore Wednesday as the strongest storm to strike Puerto Rico in more than 80 years, knocking out power to nearly the entire island and leaving frightened people huddled in buildings hoping to ride out withstand powerhouse winds that have already left death and devastation across the Caribbean. The storm first slammed the coast near Yabucoa at 6:15 a.m. as a Category 4...

This hurricane season may not break records for numbers or aggregate storm severity, but it will probably do so for destruction and cost. With St Martin and Barbuda all but destroyed, it looks like Vieques and Culebra are next: Hurricane Maria went through an astonishingly quick transformation from a minimal hurricane to a Category 5 monster in less than 24 hours. As of 9 p.m. ET [Monday], Maria had maximum sustained winds of 250 km/h, and the island of Dominica was right in the path of the worst of the...

I did my undergraduate thesis on King Edward VI of England, and the coups (attempted and successful) against his two Lords Protector. A Lord Protector watches over a King basically by being acting King until the King reaches majority around age 18. Edward died at 15, so his Lords Protector were really the monarchy for the six years Edward sat on the throne. Fast forward 450 years, and it looks like we're back to that arrangement: [President Trump is] still unprincipled, ill-informed, lazy, and...

So, this might be happening at my house next weekend: The "sous vide" part of sous vide cooking refers to the vacuum-sealed bags that are often called for when you're using the technique. (The French phrase literally means "under vacuum.") However, these days, when someone says "sous vide cooking," they're generally referring to any kind of cooking that takes place in a precisely temperature-controlled water bath, whether you're actually using a vacuum-sealed bag or not. Sous vide cooking offers...

The January release of Google Chrome will prevent videos from auto-playing: Starting in Chrome 64, which is currently earmarked for a January 2018 release, auto-play will only be allowed when the video in question is muted or when a "user has indicated an interest in the media." The latter applies if the site has been added to the home screen on mobile or if the user has frequently played media on the site on desktop. Google also says auto-play will be allowed if the user has "tapped or clicked...

While not quite as viscerally grotesque as a 140-tonne fatberg, new details about the failures at Equifax that led to its massive data breach are still pretty disgusting: Equifax has confirmed that attackers entered its system in mid-May through a web-application vulnerability that had a patch available in March. In other words, the credit-reporting giant had more than two months to take precautions that would have defended the personal data of 143 million people from being exposed. It didn't. As the...

A 140-tonne blob of fat and other horrible things is blocking a sewer in East London: What has been named the Whitechapel fatberg is a rock-solid agglomeration of fat, disposable wipes, diapers, condoms and tampons. It was discovered to the east of the city’s financial district, occupying a sixth of a mile of sewer under Whitechapel Road, between one of London’s largest mosques and a pub called the Blind Beggar, where walking tours are taken to reminisce about a notorious gangland murder. Thames Water...