During an eerily foreshadowing talk I attended the week before Sandy came crashing ashore, New York City’s climate resilience advisor, Leah Cohen, assured the small attending audience that PlaNYC 2030, a tentative map for the city’s sustainable growth, outlined no such plans to “buy back” developed areas in the city—even those dangerously close to the [...]

Life, Unbounded is preparing a series of posts on exoplanets, one a day for five days – this planetary menagerie will contain some of the most fascinating, but unsung, “heroes” of exoplanetary science . In the meantime, since our closest gas giant world is once again bright in the increasingly wintery skies of the northern [...]

“We [seem to] have a 100-year flood every two years now,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo says he told President Barack Obama during his tour of the damage from Hurricane Sandy on Tuesday. The remark is in the spirit of what climate scientists have been saying about the rise in “extreme weather events,” sea level [...]

GOWANUS, NEW YORK CITY–The winds continue to increase here, howling past windows and splattering the rain. Tiny beads of water almost feel like sand when you step outside thanks to the strong gusts. Such is Hurricane Sandy as it speeds into the New York metropolitan region and prepares to turn and slam in slow motion [...]

The Hudson River is basically Scientific American’s backyard, so when we heard the space shuttle Enterprise was  heading up the river to its final resting place aboard the USS Intrepid on Manhattan’s west flank, we couldn’t resist firing up the video camera and grabbing a few shots.  Although Enterprise never made it to Earth orbit, [...]

New York State is the key battleground that will determine the future of fracking in the U.S., and January 11, 2012, is a turning point. The date ends the public comment period on proposed state regulations that will govern the process: drilling into deep Marcellus shales, fracturing the rock with water and chemicals to release [...]