For Kite, breakfasts were about so much more than food. She said that the people who visit her house are an extension of her family and that she didn’t want to stop providing for them. In a small Missouri town, where mornings can sometimes feel more quiet than the rest of the world, one grandmother…

High above the ice in Antarctica, a group of enormous balloons was quietly tracking a phenomenon that could not be seen from the ground. In January 2013, Nasa’s BARREL mission sent 20 balloons drifting through the polar winds, carrying instruments designed to detect faint X-rays produced when energetic particles entered Earth’s upper atmosphere. The experiment…

On a hot roof in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a small experimental device sat in the sun without a fan, compressor or electrical connection. Its job was simply to get colder than the air around it. Water moved through one part of the device, heat escaped through another, and layers of insulating material helped keep the cooling…

In Canada, wood waste from logging and areas affected by wildfires is finding an unexpected fate. A new pilot in the country has begun converting this material into a lightweight, biodegradable wood foam designed to replace products made with plastic foam, according to information released by the University of British Columbia (UBC). While discarded plastic…

In Washington, a team of igniters are walking across the forest with canisters filled with a mixture of diesel fuel and gasoline. They walk in parallel, lighting grasses and shrubs, moving forward as flames spread in the back, and thousands of pine needles combust into a smoke show. At the same time, more than a…