science illustrated september/october 2008

11.28.09

Saudi Arabia's Jurassic Park

Beneath Saudi Arabia’s blazing sun, the largest greenhouse ever planned is taking shape. It will take visitors on a walk through Earth’s history—and into its future

By SciIll Staff Posted 12.04.2008 at 2:29 pm 28 Comments

A Stroll through Botanic History: The crescent-shaped greenhouse at King Abdullah International Botanical Gardens, rendered here, will be the size of 15 football fields, making it four times as big as the world’s current largest greenhouse.

It’s hard to imagine it raining in Riyadh. Less than five inches of water fall from the clouds above Saudi Arabia’s capital city each year. When the thermostat rises above 110°F, it’s not a heat wave—it’s midday. But it wasn’t always like this. A little over three million years ago, before climate-change cycles turned the area into a desert, the Arabian Peninsula’s empty riverbeds were overflowing valleys, and its dry expanses of shrubland were lush grasslands.

[ Read Full Story ]

In Defense of the LHC

As the Large Hadron Collider readies to be fired up in Geneva, Physicist Brian Cox explains what it might reveal about the workings of the Universe—and why the grandest scientific instrument ever built is well worth the $6 billion investment

By Brian Cox Posted 09.10.2008 at 11:31 am 23 Comments

Today’s most ambitious scientific instruments are modern-day cathedrals in their size and complexity, if not in their purpose—these are, after all, structures built to shatter worldviews, not to reinforce them. And the grandest of all, pictured on these pages and fired into action today, will take us on a journey to one of the least-accessible places imaginable: the realm of quantum particles, less than a billionth the size of a single atom.

[ Read Full Story ]