DENVER — “I’m a little tired of the cold,” Geoff Hargreaves says with a sigh. No surprise there: Hargreaves works in a deep freeze — 38 degrees Celsius below zero (−36° F). As curator of the National Ice Core Laboratory, his job is to keep ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland frozen. These cylinders — which would stretch more than 17,000 meters if laid end-to-end — are precious. They contain records of past climate and atmospheric chemistry, trapped in tiny bubbles that formed thousands of years ago and froze in chronological layers like tree rings. Melting is the enemy, ... (p. 32)

What do five Porsches, several Kentucky thoroughbreds and a three-story building in Guatemala City have in common? They’ve all been swallowed by sinkholes. Sadly, the sudden cave-ins sometimes claim people’s lives as well. On February 28 the earth opened up underneath the Seffner, Fla., bedroom of Jeff Bush, entombing him. The freak accident highlighted Florida’s vulnerability to sinkholes, and the seemingly sheer randomness of death by earth. But geologists are fighting back. The battle isn’t just one man versus the ground; it’s science versus society’s tendency to put structur...

Chicken Little is right. The sky is falling. The million-plus people living in Chelyabinsk, Russia, got that message on February 15, when a space rock some 17 meters across detonated over their homes. People rushed to the windows in wonderment as a blaze of light arced through the sky; seconds later many of them got a face full of glass shards. It was the most damaging cosmic collision since 1908, when an even bigger asteroid chunk blew up over Siberia. (In an era before YouTube and dashboard cameras, it was weeks before tales trickled out of reindeer herders being thrown from their tents by ...

Sometimes a little shake-up is exactly what scientists need to make a major breakthrough. Other times it can send them to jail. Six Italian researchers and one government official have each been sentenced to six years in prison for their role in communicating — or failing to communicate — seismic risks in L’Aquila, Italy. That beautiful medieval town was devastated by a magnitude 6.3 earthquake in the wee hours of April 6, 2009. More than 300 people died; the aftershocks reverberated not only across Italy but also throughout the global network of seismologists. “We’ve all been take...

Mix one part enthusiasm, two parts engineering and three parts biology — and you’ve got a recipe for do-it-yourself genetic engineering. Every November, college kids from Michigan to Munich descend on MIT, eager to show off their biohacking skills. In the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, teams battle one another to build the coolest synthetically altered organisms. If you want to create a microbe that will sniff out and destroy contaminants in mining waste ponds, or a cell that will produce drugs right in your body, iGEM is for you. Pioneers of synthetic b... (p. 32)