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One of the quietest places in the universe is an unremarkable room on the southern coast of the UK. Here, in one of the University of Southampton’s physics labs, overseen by Hendrik Ulbricht, a preposterous amount of effort has gone into eliminating every conceivable disturbance: a 1-tonne slab of granite absorbs all vibrations aside from the faintest tremors, while a pendulum repurposed from a gravitational wave observatory catches the last leftover wobbles and a fridge lowers temperatures to within a whisker of those in the deepest reaches of outer space. All of this is done in the slim hope we might answer a question that has plagued scientists since the advent of quantum mechanics a century ago. In the microscopic quantum realm, reality seems to work differently t...

Courtesy of Michelle Rozenfeld When I started my internship with the National Center for Disaster Preparedness (NCDP) back in September, I didn’t know exactly what to expect, but I knew what I was hoping for. I wanted to learn how institutions respond to disasters—and where they fall short. I wanted to turn my passion for climate justice into something more tangible than a classroom conversation or a line on my resume. Mostly, I wanted to understand: How do we move people from awareness to action? Over the past year, I’ve had the chance to explore that question through literature reviews, slide decks, grant research, conversations with professors, hurricane impact tracking, blog writing and numerous long Google Docs filled with questions I hoped to answer. And while I don’t have all ...