Paper is to news what vinyl is to music: an outdated medium decimated by its digital replacement. Except that vinyl records have finally found their niche, and sales are up again. Newspapers haven’t yet worked out how to deal with all the advertising money that has fled online, and are still in freefall. Compared to 20 years ago, there are now 3,000 fewer newspaper titles in the U.S. and 43,000 fewer newspaper journalists. Total newspaper circulation declined from more than 50 million in 2005 to just over 10 million in 2023. The decline is still accelerating. In 2022, an average of two newspa ..read more

Earthquakes in New York are even rarer than snowfall in Los Angeles. The one that struck the East Coast last Friday was one of the largest in the region in a century. And yet on the grand scale of things — no longer the Richter scale, by the way, but the Moment Magnitude Scale — it was relatively minor, with a magnitude of 4.8. The MMS is exponential: A 5.0-magnitude quake is the equivalent of 475 tons of TNT exploding, while 6.0 equals 15,000 tons, and 7.0 is 475,000 tons. While this quake and its aftershocks left people and buildings rattled, nobody was hurt and no serious damage was report ..read more

Peculiar sets of numbers populate this 1936 map of the U.S. Each state is labeled with a number that is about the same order of magnitude as the others: Nebraska is 978.2, West Virginia is 975.4, and so on. Similar numbers show up next to the local product or industry shown for each state, such as cars (629.2) in Michigan (977.4), mining (622.2) in Colorado (978.8), and cattle (636.2) in Texas (976.4). The digits also apply internationally: to Mexico (972), Canada (971), and the Panama Canal Zone (986). Know thy shelf Bookish types will have guessed what’s going on here even without looking a ..read more

When you’re “squaring the circle,” you’re attempting the impossible. Yet in the mid-19th century, that’s just what the good citizens of Circleville, Ohio, did: They straightened out the circular grid on which their city had been laid out a few decades earlier. Mathematically impossible So why didn’t they change its name to Squareville? Perhaps because, similar to its curious origins, strange things keep happening in and to this small town 25 miles south of Columbus. But first: What is “squaring the circle” and why can’t you do it? Da Vinci’s drawing of the Vitruvian Man shows a square and ci ..read more

Had he not wrapped himself in a discarded cloak, Ulysses would have frozen to death at Troy. Our hero’s host, Eumaeus the swineherd, hears the story and gets the hint: He loans Ulysses a cloak, because again, the night is freezing cold. This part of Homer’s Odyssey doesn’t sound very Mediterranean. Sprinkled through Homer’s twin epics, Felice Vinci spotted a heap of similar anecdotes that pointed away from the traditional setting of the Iliad, an account of the Trojan War, and the Odyssey, the story of Ulysses’ 10-year journey home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. For Vinci, a nuclear engine ..read more

Marie Byrd Land, in Antarctica, was named after the wife of the American explorer Richard E. Byrd Jr. He must not have liked her very much, because even by the harsh standards of the South Pole, this land is inaccessible and inhospitable, cold, and unforgiving. The desolation of Marie Byrd Land. Image taken by NASA during Operation IceBridge (2018/19), the largest airborne survey of Earth’s polar ice ever flown. (Credit: NASA/Michael Studinger, public domain). The wedge-shaped area, bounded by 60 degrees south, 90 degrees west, and 150 degrees west, is about 620,000 square miles (1.6 million ..read more

Maine has the highest median age of any state in the country: 45 years. That’s two years more than retiree magnet Florida and fully 13 years more than Utah, the state with the lowest median age (32 years). Why the big gap? Economics and religion. In Maine, jobs are fewer and wages are lower, so young people tend to leave in search of opportunities elsewhere. Mormonism is Utah’s dominant religious tradition, which prizes community — and large families. That makes Utah an outlier within the U.S., but very close to the global median age of 31 years. Most (33) states fall in the 38 to 40 bracket ..read more

For almost 20 years, “Green Boots” was a creepy landmark near the summit of Mount Everest. Mountaineers ascending via the north face would invariably pass by this frozen body, huddled into a limestone alcove some 1,150 feet (350 m) below the top. To the live climbers who passed the body, the corpse, still clothed in brightly colored climbing apparel, must have seemed a grim exemplar of the saying that “every corpse on Everest was once a highly motivated individual.” The blizzard of 1996 Green Boots, arguably the most famous body on Everest, has been identified as Tsewang Paljor, Head Constabl ..read more

Did you get a little bit bigger over the holiday season? Well, so did America. You may not have noticed in the pre-Christmas rush, but on December 19, 2023, the U.S. added an area of about 1 million km2 (roughly 386,000 square miles). That’s about the size of one Egypt or slightly more than two Californias. Ice ridges in the Beaufort Sea off the northern coast of Alaska. Following the unilateral declaration of the State Department on 19 December, a large part of that sea is now part of America’s extended continental shelf (ECS). (Credit: Harley D. Nygren/NOAA – in the public domain). How did ..read more

Squint at this map and you’ll see the Blue Banana: the European megalopolis that stretches from Manchester to Milan. It’s home to 100 million people and represents the developed world’s largest concentration of wealth, population, and international airports. Six of Europe’s 10 busiest international airports are in or near the Blue Banana, including two of London’s six: Heathrow (LHR) and Gatwick (LGW). It also contains the capital city airports of the Netherlands and France: Amsterdam (AMS) and Paris (CDG). Heathrow Airport, with the London skyline in the background. To meet growing demand ..read more