IN AUGUST OF 1905, a strange ship set sail from San Francisco Bay. The wooden brig, called Galilee—also the name of the sea where Jesus, riding in a boat himself, once allegedly soothed a storm—had been retrofitted for a new job: The Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism wanted to sail it around the Pacific Ocean, to measure [...]

Six innovator teams have joined Phase 3 of MagQuest, a $2.1 million competition to advance how we measure Earth’s magnetic field. With MagQuest, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is accelerating novel approaches to geomagnetic data collection for the World Magnetic Model. Over the next several months, the six teams will iterate and refine their designs and testing plans [...]