Photographer Gerd Ludwig has been photographing Chernobyl since 1993 and has returned to the area three times since, ultimately venturing farther inside the reactor than any Western photographer.
“Deep inside, at a dark hallway, we stopped in front of a heavy metal door. The engineer indicated I had only a brief moment to shoot. It took him a long minute to open the jammed door. The adrenaline surge was extraordinary. The room was absolutely dark, lit only by our headlamps. Wires were obstructing my view. At the far end of the room I could make out a clock. I was only able to fire off a few frames and wanted to wait for my flash to recharge. But he [had] already pulled me out.”
“People always say skunks are like cats as pets. That always makes me [laugh] because it’s never someone who’s had a skunk, clearly. Skunk people know the truth of this quite well. Skunks are way, way more affectionate and way smarter. They personify determination and a keen sense of ingenuity that would put a smile on Willie Nelson’s face and a tear in his eye. Skunks are as American as it gets. Sorry, bald eagles.”
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY Steffen Richter, Harvard University
The detection last week of primordial gravitational waves—ripples in the fabric of the universe that tell us about the first trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang—is already one of the biggest science discoveries of the year.
“Most signs of what happened back then get obliterated,” says MIT physicist Frank Wilczek. “But gravitational waves interact so weakly with everything else that they propagate, they give us a record. What the team is seeing, or claims to be seeing, is the imprint of gravitational waves on the microwave background.”
Your Shot Member Nadia Aly on her submission to the Biodiversity assignment:
“This beautiful lake holds millions of jellyfish that have lost their sting over thousands of years. With the only predator in the lake being anemones, these jellyfish thrive and grow at an outstanding rate.”
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