Materials

Sean de Guzman, right, snow survey manager at the California Department of Water Resources, conducts the first snow survey of the season with his team at Phillips Station, Calif., on Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2024. Once regularly snowbound river basins across the globe are increasingly seeing their snowpack shrink and climate change is to blame, a … Read more

Artist’s visualization of a supermassive black hole in the early universe. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, Joseph Olmsted (STScI) The Dark Energy Survey took an entire decade to produce a value for the cosmological constant—and it’s smaller than you might think! There were other stories as well, including one about primeval black holes, and because I … Read more

Florida Governor and 2024 Republican presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis (C) is guided to his vehicle by staff as he departs a campaign stop in Ankeny, Iowa, on January 12, 2024. Plunging temperatures, whipping wind and buckets of snow derailed the final stretch of caucus campaigning in the US state of Iowa Friday as Republican presidential … Read more

Christmas trees are thrown into the waters of Hammarby Sjostad to provide habitat for fish. On a freezing January morning, dozens of discarded Christmas trees collected after the holidays are tossed into Stockholm’s glacial waters, recycled to provide a welcoming habitat for marine life. The initiative, started by national sport fishing association Sportfiskarna in 2016 … Read more

Though Astrobotic, the company that built the Peregrine robot, has said a controlled touchdown on the Moon is no longer possible — it hasn’t ruled out a so-called “hard landing” or crash, a prospect that has space watchers gripped. Is it the little spaceship that could? A private US lunar lander that’s been hemorrhaging fuel … Read more

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Innovation may be what drives progress in the arts, business, sciences and technology, but the novel ideas that drive innovation often face headwinds that hinder or even prevent their adoption. Why did some good ideas, such as hand sanitizing in 19th-century hospitals or racial integration in the 20th century, take years … Read more

Credit: CC0 Public Domain Insects and spiders often receive little attention from people, except when we’re swatting them away. However, as arthropods—creatures distinguished by a hard exoskeleton and jointed legs— they play an essential role in sustaining the ecosystems humans rely on. Remarkably, arthropods make up approximately 84% of all known animal species. A study … Read more

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A Washington-based conservation group filed a petition with federal regulators Wednesday, requesting that they list Alaska king salmon as an endangered species. The Wild Fish Conservancy argued in its 67-page petition that king, or chinook, salmon numbers have declined to the point where the species is at risk of extinction in … Read more

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Wildlife documentaries like the BBC’s recent series, Planet Earth III, are renowned for offering breathtaking images of animals in their natural habitats. You’d be forgiven for thinking these shows offer an unmediated portrayal of these animals—an objective window into their lives as they hunt, rest and rear their young. But this … Read more

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Tech giants including X (then known as Twitter) and Facebook owner Meta announced thousands of job cuts globally in 2022 and 2023, as did other firms like entertainment company Disney, consultancy firm KPMG and phone company Vodafone. And let’s not forget those making redundancies as a result of company collapses such … Read more