Behind the Paper
The real stories behind the latest research papers, from conception to publication, the highs and the lows
Filtered by: Earth & Environment
Where Can Hyperscale Data Centers Still Be Built in the United States?
The rapid expansion of hyperscale data centers is straining power systems, land, and climate-sensitive infrastructure. Where can additional capacity still be built under present-day physical and infrastructural constraints? In this piece, I quantified that using large-scale geospatial data.
When Missing Data Can Change the Story
This paper was born from a simple question that kept coming back during our own work on ionospheric trends: how much do data gaps really matter?
When an archive becomes an instrument: reading solar history in tree rings
Blog behind the paper "Patterns in solar activity over the first millennium CE", written by Ronny Friedrich and Michael See, edited by Jian Wang
How to distinguish a good socialist country from a bad one
Measuring biased representation on the world
Improving Watershed Models with Tile and Rotation-Enhanced Cropland (TREC) dataset
Land-use maps drive ecohydrologic modeling and water-quality estimates. In the U.S. Midwest, nitrate and water movement depend on crop rotation and tile drainage, but most national datasets do not fully capture these factors. Our TREC map captures both to improve the realism of the watershed model.
Dynamic stretching beyond electron transfer in a homointerpenetrated MOF for enhanced Fenton-like reactions
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-68917-z
Behind the Paper "Smart Water for Sustainable Agriculture Through Climate Resilient Assessment and Integrated Soil Water Crop Management"
Water quality is a key determinant of sustainable irrigation under climate variability. Integrating soil, water, and crop interactions with climate resilient assessment approaches is essential to support productive agroecosystems and long term water security.
Extraordinarily long duration of Eocene geomagnetic polarity reversals
Earth’s magnetic field reversals were long thought to finish within about 10,000 years, but new evidence shows two reversals around 40 million years ago lasted 18,000 and 70,000 years, indicating far greater variability in their durations.
