California is notorious for its earthquakes, but a stunning new discovery reveals for the first time just how much we’ve underestimated its omnipresent earth-shaking potential. By the time you just about finish reading this story, in fact, Southern California will probably have experienced another quake – based off a new, unprecedented deep dive into 10
For the first time, engineers have demonstrated how ‘bubbles’ of lighter grains can form in sand, just as they can in other fluids – even though granular materials tend towards mixing. Although individual grains of sand are solid, when you get a lot of them, they behave surprisingly like a fluid – think of falling
Greenland, home to the Earth’s second largest ice sheet, has lost ice at an accelerating pace in the past several decades – a nearly sixfold increase that could contribute to future sea level rise, according to a new study based on nearly a half century of data. The findings, published Monday in the Proceedings of
We know that self-driving cars are promising to make the roads safer and give us more time to relax, but the energy-saving and pollution-cutting benefits are also important. Now a new study suggests those benefits might not be as big as we thought. The problem, according to researchers from the University of Michigan, is that
There are four known exoplanets orbiting the star HR 8799, all of which are more massive than the planet Jupiter. These planets were all detected by direct imaging taken over a period of seven years, with the periods of these worlds ranging from decades to centuries. Jason Wang / Christian Marois In the early 1990s,
COLORADO SPRINGS — After placing more than 60 satellites into orbit on a single Falcon 9 last year, Spaceflight says it will focus on launching smaller numbers of satellites at a time on more launches this year. The Seattle-based company, best known for arranging launches of small satellites as secondary payloads on larger launch vehicles,
In the Hollywood blockbuster The Core, the planet’s core suddenly stops rotating, causing Earth’s magnetic field to collapse. Then bursts of deadly microwaves cook the Colosseum and melt the Golden Gate Bridge. While “nearly everything in the movie is wrong,” according to Justin Revenaugh, a seismologist from the University of Minnesota, it is true that
Share to facebook Share to twitter Share to linkedin Ocean Outbreak by Dr. Drew Harvell Priya Shukla | Modified from an image by Steven Pavlov Among the many downstream impacts of climate change in the ocean – warming, acidification, deoxygenation - diseases are rarely considered. While diseases are a common biological occurrence, climate change is expected to
A beautiful spring morning at the Topeka Zoo in Kansas turned tragic Saturday when a male Sumatran tiger attacked a keeper, inflicting wounds that sent her to a hospital. Although keepers are never supposed to be in the same space as the tigers, they found themselves together in the outdoor habitat that morning for reasons
The Cassini mission to Saturn and its moons wrapped up in 2017, when the spacecraft was sent plunging into the gas giant to meet its end. But there’s still a lot of data from the mission to keep scientists busy. A team of scientists working with Cassini data have made a surprising discovery: Titan’s methane-filled
Images showed smoke rising from the site following the incident. Craig Bailey / Florida Today SpaceX’s historic Crew Dragon spacecraft that launched for the first time last month appears to have exploded, according to reports, potentially delaying the return to flight of humans from American soil. On Saturday, April 20, an explosion was reported at
So you’ve discovered an unusual winged insect preserved in amber, and it happens to have a superb set of mouth parts dangling from its head. You could name it after a president’s body part, maybe. If not David Attenborough. Again. Or just do what one researcher did with a specimen that doesn’t seem to fit
We are surrounded by alien worlds. In neighbouring star systems, Earth-like planets abound, with unusual names like Proxima b, TRAPPIST–1e, Ross–128b, and LHS–1140b. Are these strange places habitable? Are they homes for life-forms we can’t yet imagine? The jury is out. While these exoplanets all orbit within the so-called habitable aka Goldilocks zones of their
Bryan Thomas doesn’t want any more “wishy-washy conversations about climate change.” For four years, he has served as station chief of the Barrow Atmospheric Baseline Observatory, America’s northernmost scientific outpost in its fastest-warming state. Each morning, after digging through snow to his office’s front door, Thomas checks the preliminary number on the observatory’s carbon dioxide monitor.
The Earth remains humanity’s only home in all the Universe, and the only planet that we know of capable of supporting human beings. Today, Earth Day, it’s more important than ever to appreciate it. NASA / Expedition 7 With the advent of rocketry and spaceflight, our cosmic perspective changed forever. The very first image of
The human face is unique yet universal, mechanical yet expressive, modern yet ancient. For over 4 million years, our features have slowly morphed into what we see today in the mirror, a brief stop on the way to who knows what. From early hominins to modern Homo sapiens, a new review written by leading experts
A test of the emergency escape system for SpaceX’s new spacecraft designed to carry NASA astronauts into orbit went awry on Saturday, and an unverified video making the rounds on Twitter claims to show just how bad the anomaly was. On Saturday afternoon, SpaceX attempted a static-fire test of the emergency abort system on its
You may know ESPN for SportsCenter. Here the show’s anchors Hannah Storm (C) and Jay Crawford (R) interview musician Lenny Kravitz. But ESPN is involved in many other things. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images for ESPN) Getty If you are wondering what ESPN stands for, it’s not “extrasensory perception and noshing.” Literally, ESPN stands for
This article originally appeared in the April 8, 2019 issue of SpaceNews magazine. During a speech to a room packed with Pentagon contractors last August, Mike Griffin, the recently appointed U.S. undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, openly fretted about how little time he had left in office and how much he wanted to
There’s a trick to night-time photography: longer exposures. They soak up more light, making everything pop brilliantly in your shot, provided your camera stays really, really still. Of course, most of the time, we’re still only talking extra seconds of exposure time, maybe minutes. Okay, in rare cases, hours. But a team of amateur astronomer
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