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A tragedy in the making.

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How Lake Kivu became a ticking time bomb

Lake Kivu sits along the East African Rift Valley, dotted with hot springs that feed carbon dioxide and methane into its depths.

“Kivu has a complicated vertical structure,” Sergei Katsev, a limnologist at University of Minnesota Duluth, explains. While “the top [200 feet] or so mix regularly,” the rest of the lake remains stratified. Nearly 72 cubic miles of dissolved carbon dioxide and 14 cubic miles of methane, laced with toxic hydrogen sulfide, remain trapped in the bottom of the lake. They sit beneath a “main density gradient” at 850 feet below the surface.

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A new technique could allow researchers to distinguish the swimming motion of a species of microorganisms without the need to track individuals within a population.

What did the plant say to the other plant?

The year 2023 saw the “enshittification” of platforms from Facebook to Google Search. A new exit strategy means platforms will have to play nicely with your data, even if you leave for a rival.

Archaeologists in Egypt have unearthed a cache of treasures—including more than 50 wooden sarcophagi, a funerary temple dedicated to an Old Kingdom queen and a 13-foot-long Book of the Dead scroll—at the Saqqara necropolis, a vast burial ground south of Cairo, according to a statement from the…

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The team also discovered dozens of sarcophagi, wooden masks and ancient board games.

Topological photonics could impact the scalability of integrated photonics, but it has shown limited reconfigurability to date. Here, the authors demonstrate reprogrammable integrated photonics as a nearly universal platform for topological models.

Archaeologists measured the magnetic fields found in clay bricks to determine the construction date of Babylon’s Ishtar Gate.

Kim, SW., Wang, K., Chen, S. et al. On the dynamical stability of copper-doped lead apatite. npj Comput Mater 10, 16 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41524-024-01206-9

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