In the most extreme regions of the Universe, galaxies are being killed. Their star formation is being shut down and astronomers want to know why. The first ever Canadian-led large project on one of the world’s leading telescopes is hoping to do just that. The new program, called the Virgo Environment Traced in Carbon Monoxide
admin
The JunoCam onboard NASA’s Juno spacecraft continues to provide we Earthbound humans with a steady stream of stunning images of Jupiter. We can’t get enough of the gas giant’s hypnotic, other-worldly beauty. This image of Io passing over Jupiter is the latest one to awaken our sense of wonder. This image was processed by Kevin
China’s Yutu-2 lunar lander just sent back new images of a strange substance it found near a small crater on the far side of the Moon. Last month, the team behind the lunar rover claimed it had found a “colored mysterious substance” as described in the rover’s diary, which claimed that the material’s “shape and color
More than 10 years after it was released, watching Pixar’s film WALL-E today is a chilling experience. The backdrop of WALL-E and EVE’s robot love story is a dystopian society where humans have abandoned Earth to their trash and left robots to clean up while they cruise space. When the much-loved animation came out in
As it looks increasingly unlikely we’re going to meet our climate mitigation targets, scientists have been investigating more and more extreme solutions, such as geoengineering. Examples include spraying huge amounts of sunlight-reflecting particles into the atmosphere, or dumping trillions of tons of fake snow onto glaciers to stabilise them. These ideas are untested, incredibly risky,
Pacific islanders are running out of time. If global emissions are not drastically reduced, thousands of low-lying atolls may become uninhabitable within decades. And the biggest threat doesn’t actually come from losing land to rising seas. Small island states in the Pacific are responsible for only 0.03 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and
The climate crisis is here, and the animals are suffering. Earth’s shifting climate reality is changing how animals around the globe breed and feed – and the effects are nothing short of devastating. Here are just a few of the animals whose existence on this planet has become even more precarious – or even been
Between news of devastating natural disasters, horrifying scientific predictions, and the infuriating lack of political will to do anything about it all, it seems we can’t catch a collective breath at the moment. Some days, news about the climate crisis feels like a heavy weight on my chest. And I’m not alone. Some of us
This September, as the world takes a stand on climate change like never before, let’s spare a thought for those who helped set the stage. The history of climate science stretches back nearly two hundred years, and in all that time, few women have been memorialised in the discipline. Just ten years ago, Eunice Foote
I’m going to start with this: climate change is definitely real. We’re extremely sure it’s caused by humans and we are already seeing the effects all over the world. But despite sound scientific evidence and huge numbers of scientists in agreement, there are still a surprising amount of people who think we’re making it all
Compared to our brief human lives, we tend to think of events on galactic scales as ones that happen extremely slowly. But that’s not always the case. In a spectacular fashion, six galaxies have just undergone a huge transformation in a matter of mere months. They’ve gone from relatively peaceful galaxies to active quasars –
If you had to name a creature in the ocean with sharp teeth, you’d probably say “shark”, right? I’d be thinking shark. Obviously, the answer is shark. But what about the humble sea urchin? These strange, prickly orbs dwell on the bottom of the seabed and don’t even look like they have mouths, let alone
A huge experiment to pin down the mass of one of the Universe’s most perplexing particles has put a cap on how big the neutrino might actually be. Once considered massless, the particle’s mass is now thought to weigh no more than a single electronvolt. It might not be a precise answer, but it does
It’s springtime Down Under, and along with overexuberant local football fans, that means another annual menace on Australian streets: angry birds. September is peak magpie breeding season. And like much of Australia’s native wildlife — think deadly snakes, spiders and jellyfish — the country’s magpies are meaner than those found elsewhere. Male birds defending their
The time has come. We’re going to smash a spacecraft into an asteroid. The asteroid is Didymos B, the smaller of the two objects in the Didymos binary asteroid system. The spacecraft is NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART). The reason: to test whether a spacecraft impact can deflect an asteroid’s trajectory, as a means
To predict the future, it can help to look at the past. That’s especially true when it comes to climate change: Studying what the planet looked like millions of years ago can give insight into what we can expect as warming continues. In a study published today in the journal Science Advances, scientists simulated the
Hopes of a breakthrough in international climate change ambitions are being downplayed for a landmark meeting in New York. The United Nations climate action summit looks set to disappoint the thousands of campaigners who will take to the city’s streets just days earlier. The summit is arguably the most important moment for climate change since
This Friday in the lead-up to the United Nations climate summit, children and adults worldwide will go on strike for stronger action on climate change. However, you may ask, is striking effective? What can it really hope to achieve? Our research, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Psychology, suggests striking can promote the psychological
A 16-year-old Swedish climate activist demanded Wednesday that Congress “listen to the scientists” who were sounding the alarm on the threat of global warming. Rather than offer prepared remarks to the House Climate Crisis Committee and a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee, Greta Thunberg said she was attaching as testimony a landmark 2018 United Nations report
Last week, 16-year-old activist Greta Thunberg and hundreds of other young activists protested in front of the White House, demanding action on climate change. This Friday, September 20, they’ll be joined by thousands of other young (and older) protestors across the world to take part in a global the Climate Strike. But what exactly is
Something mysterious happened nearly half a billion years ago that triggered one of the most important changes in the history of life on Earth. Suddenly, there was an explosion of species, with the biodiversity of invertebrate animals increasing from a very low level to something similar to what we see today. The most popular explanation
We’re yet to make a conclusive detection of an exomoon. But if such moons are out there, orbiting planets outside the Solar System, one of them could be responsible for the peculiarities of KIC 8462852 – AKA Tabby’s star. New research suggests that the strange brightening and dimming fluctuations of the star’s light that have
Here’s your dismal fact of the day: if the world’s cement industry was a country, it would sit just behind China and the US as the third leading producer of carbon pollution. It doesn’t need to be that way, though. We just might be able to change that ugly statistic by producing the ingredients for
The biggest volcano on Jupiter’s moon Io could be about to blow. Decades of observation have revealed a periodic cycle in the volcano’s eruptions; according to past behaviour, it’s due for the next one any day. That potential burst of activity – or lack thereof – could help us to better understand the volcano and
Katharine Hayhoe often encounters people in the US and Canada who still regard climate change as an issue best left for the distant future. “That it affects future generations, not me, it affects others but not me, it affects people who live over there, but not me,” she said. “And why is that dangerous? Because
The US Navy has for the first time confirmed that a set of eerie, grainy videos that appear to show UFOs flying through the sky are indeed real – and contain phenomena the military still cannot identify. The sensational footage in question – which began appearing in media outlets including The New York Times from
We humans have a natural tendency to focus on negative stories. We tend to assume things are worse than they really are, and going downhill fast. We forget how bad things were in the past and how far we’ve come. In reality, the world is often better — and getting better — than we think,
In what might constitute the year’s strangest salvo against the scourge of “fake news”, anthropologists have experimentally tested whether you can really make a knife out of frozen excrement. They conclude that you cannot. Back in 1998, University of British Columbia anthropologist and popular writer Wade Davis recounted in his book Shadows in the Sun
In a coastal town in Washington state, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can’t even think about it. But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. “Fear,” said Maryland 16-year-old
Arguments happen in every marriage – if you know differently, please tell us – but a new study of 121 couples suggests that those in happy relationships argue about specific sorts of issues. These couples all described themselves as being in happy marriages, and their arguments tended to focus on issues that can be practically
Last month, we got the exciting news of a rare flash of light on Jupiter, bright enough to be seen through telescopes. According to a new analysis, the cause of this smash was a small asteroid, with a density consistent with meteors that are equal parts stone and iron. The meteor exploded in Jupiter’s upper
Wi-Fi just turned 6. Not in terms of years old (Wi-Fi is a lot older than that), but in terms of its version number: Wi-Fi 6 officially launched this week. What does that mean for you? Well, if you’re anything like me – meaning you spend a lot of time indoors using the internet –
Astronomers have identified what could be the most massive neutron star to date. It’s a pulsar, named J0740+6620, and discrepancies in the timing of its pulses has allowed its mass to be calculated to 2.14 times that of the Sun, packed into a star just 30 kilometres (19 miles) across. To put that into perspective,
On its surface, the plan was simple: gene-hack mosquitoes so their offspring immediately die, mix them with disease-spreading bugs in the wild, and watch the population drop off. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite pan out. The genetically-altered mosquitoes did mix with the wild population, and for a brief period the number of mosquitoes in Jacobino, Brazil
Springtime on Earth can be a riotous affair, as plants come back to life and creatures large and small get ready to mate. Nothing like that happens on Mars, of course. But even on a cold world like Mars, springtime brings changes, though you have to look a little more closely to see them. Lucky
The Northern Hemisphere just had its hottest summer on record since 1880, according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data released Monday. NOAA found the average global surface temperature taken by thousands of thermometers, buoys and other sensors on land and sea tied with that of 2016 for the top spot, with a temperature anomaly
Getting spacecraft into orbit is incredibly costly and difficult, and so scientists keep returning to the idea of a space elevator that can lift people and equipment out of Earth’s atmosphere more easily. Now researchers have come up with a twist on the concept that – in theory at least – is doable with today’s
A small group of super-powerful corporations has become a dominant force that essentially controls human industry and shapes the modern world we live in, scientists say. In a new study, an international team of researchers suggests that this elite cadre of dominant transnational corporations (TNCs, sometimes also called multinationals) may wield an outsized influence over
In the Solar System, there are over 6,300 known comets. There are millions of asteroids. And of all those objects, only ‘Oumuamua – a red, cigar-shaped asteroid – is known to have come from elsewhere. Until now. A new discovery, revealed just last week, has astronomers excited. A comet named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), discovered on
According to new research, the dead may not always rest in peace… quite literally. For more than a year after death, corpses move around “significantly”, and this finding could be important for forensic investigations. Researchers at an Australia-based decomposition research facility – colloquially known as a “body farm”, a term some scientists find disrespectful –
Reader question: I heard that carbon dioxide makes up 0.04 percent of the world’s atmosphere. Not 0.4 percent or 4 percent, but 0.04 percent! How can it be so important in global warming if it’s such a small percentage? I am often asked how carbon dioxide can have an important effect on global climate when its
In late July 1997, William Earl Moldt left a nightclub and was never seen again. Until last month, that is. After 22 years on missing persons lists, his last resting place was finally spotted – from space. By random chance, somebody noticed the vehicle Moldt was driving the night he disappeared – a white 1994
The science of climate change is more than 150 years old and it is probably the most tested area of modern science. However the energy industry, political lobbyists and others have spent the last 30 years sowing doubt about the science where none really exists. The latest estimate is that the world’s five largest publicly-owned
On August 30, amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov spotted a comet of extrasolar origin passing through our Solar System. This is the second time in as many years that an interstellar object has been observed (the last being ‘Oumuamua 2.0 in 2017). Thanks to the Gemini Observatory, we now have pictures of this comet, making it
The supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, Sagittarius A*, is usually relatively quiet. It’s not an active nucleus, spewing light and heat into the space around it; most of the time, the black hole’s activity is low key, with minimal fluctuations in its brightness. Most of the time. Recently, astronomers caught
Antarctica is known for its tempestuous weather, and the surface winds surrounding this icy southern continent are some of the strongest and most persistent on Earth. Throughout most of the year, and especially in winter, these powerful gusts of coastal air drive what is described as the “mightiest current” in all the oceans: the Antarctic
More than 350 years after its first publication, you might think John Milton’s epic Paradise Lost poem had given up all the secrets it had to give – but it turns out there are still discoveries to be made, concealed inside these thousands of lines of verse. Undergraduate Miranda Phaal from Tufts University in Massachusetts
You might think you already know black – even super-black Vantablack, previously the blackest material known to science – but researchers just came up with a material that takes black to a new level of blackness. The new, as-yet-unnamed ultra-black material is made from vertically aligned carbon nanotubes (CNTs), microscopic carbon strings that are a
- 1
- 2
- 3
- …
- 63
- Next Page »