These wings from a Morpho butterfly are normally bright blue thanks to structural color. Because the nanosized spacing between the wings’ scales (micrograph) matches blue light’s wavelength (between ...

Ripples. Consequences. Repercussions. In daily life, the butterfly effect is the idea that small, seemingly trivial events can trigger a series of events leading to massive, unpredictable outcomes.

In 1961, MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz was inputting numbers into a weather prediction program. His model was based on a dozen variables, the value of one being .506127. When he ran the model again, ...