By Marisa De La Villa Before Andrei Sakharov became one of the Soviet Union’s most outspoken dissidents, he was celebrated as one of its greatest scientific minds. 1  In the early stages of the Cold War, he was devoted to the department of thermonuclear weapons, convinced that contributing to national defense was both a necessity and something quite patriotic . 2  Working within the research centers of the Soviet nuclear program, Sakharov helped shape the theories that made the USSR’s hydrogen bomb possible. This included working on the designs that would lead to the most terrifying weapon ever tested: the Tsar Bomba. 3 The Tsar Bomba was devised through what physicists described as a “layer cake” design, stacking fission and fusion stages in carefully arranged layers that amplified the explosion step by step. Like a tiered cake, each layer was dependent on the one beneath it, creating a cascading reaction that pushed the weapon’s destructive power to an unprecedented scale. 4...

By Maili Pieragostini In 2014, the water of Flint, Michigan, shifted from a basic necessity to a quiet, everyday danger. When the city switched its water source in an effort to save money, the water that flowed into homes wasn’t just discolored…it was dangerous. Lead seeped from aging pipes. Children were breaking out in rashes. Mothers and fathers were losing their hair. For many, bottled water became the new norm – and focus – of daily life, in order to drink, cook, and clean. This was the Flint Water Crisis: a failure of infrastructure, of oversight, and of justice.  In the middle of this crisis, one voice broke through – not of a politician, a scientist, or even of a seasoned activist, but of a child determined to be heard. Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, otherwise known as Little Miss Flint.  In 2016, at barely eight years old, Copeny wrote a letter to President Barack Obama. She told him what life in Flint had become for kids like her: what it meant to grow up in a city where ...

by Maili Pieragostini  Who was the first to recognize that anthropogenic activity could cause global warming? Many might say Joseph Fourier, who was the first to theorize through mathematical calculations that Earth’s atmosphere insulates the planet. Others might say John Tyndall, the 19th-century physicist whose name became synonymous with the science of heat and gases. But there is another scientist, a woman whose name was nearly lost to history. Eunice Newton Foote, the first to experimentally demonstrate that certain gases trap heat from the sun.  Eunice Newton Foote was a scientist, inventor, and early advocate for women’s rights. In 1856, at a time when women were excluded from most scientific institutions, Foote conducted a groundbreaking experiment in her home laboratory. Her goal was simple yet profound: to understand how different gases respond to sunlight. Using glass cylinders, thermometers, and an air pump, Foote tested how gases like carbon dioxide and ordinary a...