The fiery fountains of erupting volcanoes seem tailor-made for the Discovery Channel. But scientists, too, are interested in capturing footage of these natural spectacles, especially for what it can reveal about how superheated gas and rock blast out at up to supersonic speeds. New high-speed videos from Italy’s Mount Stromboli show that its continual eruptions can belch stuff out more than twice as fast as scientists had thought. This surprising finding is bolstered by laboratory experiments that grind up rock and eject it at high pressure, in a sort of tabletop eruption. “We think we’... (p. 20)

Collective motion emerges spontaneously in wiggling protein strands.

Deepwater organisms may be slow to recover from Gulf accident.

Potential eruption wouldn’t be anything like Santorini’s storied Bronze Age blowout, scientists say.

By many measures, the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that shook Japan a year ago was a record-breaker. It was the largest quake in the country’s written history, the trigger for the worst nuclear accident in 25 years and the costliest natural disaster ever. Amid such superlatives, it’s easy to forget one more: During the Tohoku-oki quake, the seafloor off Japan’s coast wrenched itself farther apart than scientists had ever measured along any seafloor. In places, chunks of ground slipped horizontally past their neighbors by more than 50 meters and vertically by 10 meters. “The earthquake wa... (p. 22)