Everyone is talking about Greenland. Here’s what it’s like to visit
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A few months ago, Greenland was quietly getting on with winter, as the territory slid deeper into the darkness that envelops the world’s northerly reaches at this time of year.

But President Donald Trump’s musings about America taking over this island of 56,000 largely Inuit people, halfway between New York and Moscow, has seen Greenland shaken from its frozen Arctic anonymity.

Denmark, for whom Greenland is an autonomous crown dependency, has protested it’s not for sale. Officials in Greenland, meanwhile, have sought to assert the territory’s right to independence.

The conversation continues to intensify. A contentious March 28 visit to a US military installation by Usha Vance, the second lady, accompanied by her husband, Vice President JD Vance, was the latest in a series of events to focus attention on Trump’s ambitions for Greenland.

The visit was originally planned as a cultural exchange, but was shortened following complaints from Greenland Prime Minister Mute B. Egede.

Had the Vances prolonged their scheduled brief visit, they would’ve discovered a ruggedly pristine wildernesses steeped in rich Indigenous culture.

An inhospitable icecap several miles deep covers 80% of Greenland, forcing the Inuit to dwell along the shorelines in brightly painted communities. Here, they spend brutally cold winters hunting seals on ice under the northern lights in near perpetual darkness. Although these days, they can also rely on community stores.

The problem for travelers over the years has been getting to Greenland via time-consuming indirect flights. That’s changing. Late in 2024, the capital Nuuk opened a long-delayed international airport. From June 2025, United Airlines will be operating a twice-weekly direct service from Newark to Nuuk.

Two further international airports are due to open by 2026 — Qaqortoq in South Greenland and more significantly in Ilulissat, the island’s only real tourism hotspot.

Curiosity rover makes ‘arguably the most exciting organic detection to date on Mars’
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The NASA Curiosity rover has detected the largest organic molecules found to date on Mars, opening a window into the red planet’s past. The newly detected compounds suggest complex organic chemistry may have occurred in the planet’s past — the kind necessary for the origin of life, according to new research.

The organic compounds, which include decane, undecane and dodecane, came to light after the rover analyzed a pulverized 3.7 billion-year-old rock sample using its onboard mini lab called SAM, short for Sample Analysis at Mars.

Scientists believe the long chains of molecules could be fragments of fatty acids, which are organic molecules that are chemical building blocks of life on Earth and help form cell membranes. But such compounds can also be formed without the presence of life, created when water interacts with minerals in hydrothermal vents.

The molecules cannot currently be confirmed as evidence of past life on the red planet, but they add to the growing list of compounds that robotic explorers have discovered on Mars in recent years. A study detailing the findings was published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The detection of the fragile molecules also encourages astrobiologists that if any biosignatures, or past signs of life, ever existed on Mars, they are likely still detectable despite the harsh solar radiation that has bombarded the planet for tens of millions of years.

“Ancient life, if it happened on Mars, it would have released some complex and fragile molecules,” said lead study author Dr. Caroline Freissinet, research scientist at the French National Centre for Scientific Research in the Laboratory for Atmospheres, Observations, and Space in Guyancourt, France. “And because now we know that Mars can preserve these complex and fragile molecules, it means that we could detect ancient life on Mars.”

Curiosity has maintained pristine pieces of the Cumberland sample in a “doggy bag” so that the team could have the rover revisit it later, even miles away from the site where it was collected. The team developed and tested innovative methods in its lab on Earth before sending messages to the rover to try experiments on the sample.
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In a quest to see whether amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, existed in the sample, the team instructed the rover to heat up the sample twice within SAM’s oven. When it measured the mass of the molecules released during heating, there weren’t any amino acids, but they found something entirely unexpected.

An intriguing detection
The team was surprised to detect small amounts of decane, undecane and dodecane, so it had to conduct a reverse experiment on Earth to determine whether these organic compounds were the remnants of the fatty acids undecanoic acid, dodecanoic acid and tridecanoic acid, respectively.

The scientists mixed undecanoic acid into a clay similar to what exists on Mars and heated it up in a way that mimicked conditions within SAM’s oven. The undecanoic acid released decane, just like what Curiosity detected.

Each fatty acid remnant detected by Curiosity was made with a long chain of 11 to 13 carbon atoms. Previous molecules detected on Mars were smaller, meaning their atomic weight was less than the molecules found in the new study, and simpler.
“It’s notable that non-biological processes typically make shorter fatty acids, with less than 12 carbons,” said study coauthor Dr. Amy Williams, associate professor of geology at the University of Florida and assistant director of the Astraeus Space Institute, in an email. “Larger and more complex molecules are likely what are required for an origin of life, if it ever occurred on Mars.”

Remote and rugged
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A more organic way to see this coast is by the multi-day coastal ferry, the long-running Sarfaq Ittuk, of the Arctic Umiaq Line. It’s less corporate than the modern cruise ships and travelers get to meet Inuit commuters. Greenland is pricey. Lettuce in a local community store might cost $10, but this coastal voyage won’t break the bank.

The hot ticket currently for exploring Greenland’s wilder side is to head to the east coast facing Europe. It’s raw and sees far fewer tourists, with a harshly dramatic coastline of fjords where icebergs drift south. There are no roads and the scattered population of just over 3,500 people inhabit a coastline roughly the distance from New York to Denver.

A growing number of small expedition vessels probe this remote coast for its frosted scenery and wildlife. Increasingly popular is the world’s largest fjord system of Scoresby Sound with its sharp-fanged mountains and hanging valleys choked by glaciers. Sailing north is the prosaically named North East Greenland National Park, fabulous for spotting wildlife on the tundra.

Travelers come to see polar bears which, during the northern hemisphere’s summer, move closer to land as the sea-ice melts. There are also musk oxen, great flocks of migrating geese, Arctic foxes and walrus.
Some of these animals are fair game for the local communities. Perhaps Greenland’s most interesting cultural visit is to a village that will take longer to learn how to pronounce than actually walk around — Ittoqqortoormiit. Five hundred miles north of its neighboring settlement, the 345 locals are frozen in for nine months of the year. Ships sail in to meet them during the brief summer melt between June and August.

Locked in by ice, they’ve retained traditional habits.

“My parents hunt nearly all their food,” said Mette Barselajsen, who owns Ittoqqortoormiit’s only guesthouse. “They prefer the old ways, burying it in the ground to ferment and preserve it. Just one muskox can bring 440 pounds of meat.”

Josh Giddey hits halfcourt buzzer-beater over LeBron James to cap wild finale as the Bulls stun the Lakers
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Josh Giddey hit a game-winning, halfcourt buzzer-beater over LeBron James as the Chicago Bulls stunned the Los Angeles Lakers in one of the wildest endings to an NBA game you are ever likely to see.

Trailing 115-110 with 12.6 seconds remaining, Giddey’s inbound pass found Nikola Vucevic, who pushed the ball to a wide-open Patrick Williams for a corner three-pointer.

James then fluffed the Lakers inbound pass from the baseline, allowing Giddey to steal the ball and find Coby White for a second Bulls triple in quick succession to put Chicago up 116-115 with 6.1 seconds remaining.
Austin Reaves then made a driving layup to put the Lakers ahead 117-116 with 3.3 seconds left, but the game wasn’t done yet.

With no timeouts remaining, Giddey inbounded the ball to Williams from the baseline, got the pass back, took one dribble and launched a shot from beyond halfcourt.

Supporters in the stands seemed frozen in anticipation as the ball sailed through the air, and the United Center then erupted as it fell through the net. After the dramatic win, Giddey found himself being swarmed by his teammates.

“Special moment to do it with these guys, this team,” Giddey said, per ESPN. “We’ve shown over the last month to six weeks that we can beat anybody. The way we play the game, I think it wears people down.

“We get up and down. We run. We put heat on them to get back. A lot of veteran teams don’t particularly want to get back and play in transition.”

Giddey later told the Bulls broadcast that he’d “never made a game-winner before.”

The ending capped an incredible couple of games for the Lakers, who had themselves won their last game against the Indiana Pacers on Wednesday with a buzzer-beating tip-in from James.