The deserts of northwest Utah are wide and flat and dusty. As our car zooms along Highway 80, we see only a few green plants — and one of those is a plastic Christmas tree that someone stood up by the road as a joke.  Most natural landscapes are curvy, bumpy, jagged — all kinds of shapes. When you see something straight, people usually built it that way for a purpose, like a train track or highway. But this line across the mountainsides formed naturally.  It was carved into the mountains by Lake Bonneville, an ancient, inland body of water that once covered much of Utah — one...

People collect persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, in their bodies from eating seals, bird eggs and other living things that contain them. But what about the animals themselves? Do POPs also harm animals in the Arctic? In fact, they do. Any time POPs collect in an animal in large amounts, they can harm that animal. So POPs have their worst effects on animals that eat other animals, such as polar bears, seals, walruses, whales and different kinds of sea birds called gulls. Scientists have watched the effects of POPs for many years on Bear Island, a tiny teardrop of barren, windswept land ...

Behind the scenes at the Lawrence Berkeley National LaboratoryLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory stands hidden in the forest-covered hills above Berkeley, California. Of all the places you might work when you grow up, it would be one of the more unusual. Standing at a window I look outside, five stories down, where a deer with branched antlers wanders into the parking lot. Several people tell me that flocks of vicious wild turkeys also roam these hills. LBNL has plenty of mystery attached to it. Parts of the 2003 movie Incredible Hulk were filmed at the lab. The scientists here don’t rea...

The tortures of Antarctica include not only cold, but also heat. I discovered it nearly every morning. As I woke in my tiny tent, in the middle of a million square miles of ice, I struggled to get my clothes off quickly enough. The thermometer hanging in my tent often read over 30ºC. One time it even said 37ºC! It shows that part of what keeps Antarctica cold and frozen is its color. Because it is white, it reflects most of its sunlight, and heat, back into space. But our tents were bright red, and in the 24-hour summer sunlight they absorbed plenty of heat (and my ow...