Articles by Jessica Leigh Hester

For hundreds of years, sailors have zipped across frozen lakes and rivers—but now chances are fewer and farther between.

“It sounds like if you got a big Slurpee, and then dumped it on the ground.”

A Syracuse rooftop still holds some pretty puzzling real estate.

Book waste can be beautiful.

They're thriving, pooping, and fouling up the water around the drug lord's former estate.

The images, by artist and professor Dornith Doherty, are ethereal and oddly comforting.

Gypsum is common, but this specimen is remarkable.

An art museum found a very old toilet—right under where its new bathroom was being built.

Experts are flashing a warning for the future.

Just because they're huge and garish doesn't mean they're easy to find.

The bubbles are mostly carbon dioxide, and gurgle up from the ground in streamers or curtains.

The 20,000-square-foot house requires endless renovations, but the ceiling is high enough to fly a drone inside.

The fire-scorched landscape needs water. But not the kind that recently fell on Canberra.

The underground menace is now a reminder that people should be kinder to their pipes.

Satellite images track the shift from dry to wet at a vast, prehistoric lake bed in southern Africa.

Meet the icy continent's menagerie of microbes.

After devastating Australian bushfires, root vegetables could help the brush-tailed rock-wallaby hang on.

What they actually smell like seems to be in the nose of the beholder.

Some ash particles will blow or wash away, but others will get sealed into the sedimentary record.

The paintings once dazzled and enlightened mid-century planetarium-goers.

This shit is lit.

The slim volume on city toilets directed in-the-know readers to discreet hookup spots.

Cars slowed to a halt on State Route 240, but the plants just kept bounding along.

Fossil plants millions of years old are helping scientists imagine an ancient Arctic forest.