by Kathryn Willis, Britta Denise Hardesty, Katie Conlon, Win Cowger, The Conversation Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain In the two decades to 2019, global plastic production doubled. By 2040, plastic manufacturing and processing could consume as much as 20% of global oil production and use up 15% of the annual carbon emissions budget. Most of the … Read more
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain I first encountered the three-body problem 60 years ago, in a short story called “Placet is a Crazy Place” by American science fiction writer Frederic Brown. In Brown’s story, Placet is a planet in a figure-of-eight orbit around two stars, one of which is composed of ordinary matter, the other of … Read more
Gravitational Wave science holds great potential that scientists are eager to develop. Is a gravitational wave observatory on the moon the way forward? Credit: NASA/Goddard/LRO. Scientists detected the first long-predicted gravitational wave in 2015, and since then, researchers have been hungering for better detectors. But the Earth is warm and seismically noisy, and that will … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain Over the last 25 years, the ozone hole which forming over Antarctica each spring has started to shrink. But over the last four years, even as the hole has shrunk it has persisted for an unusually long time. Our new research found that instead of closing up during November it has … Read more
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The impact of human activities—such as greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation—on Earth’s surface have been well-studied. Now, hydrology researchers from the University of Arizona have investigated how humans impact Earth’s deep subsurface, a zone that lies hundreds of meters to several kilometers beneath the planet’s surface. “We looked at how the … Read more
The largest set of interconnected pedigrees reconstructed in RK and the cemetery map highlighting the burial location of related individuals. Credit: Nature (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07312-4 An international team of archaeologists and archaeogenetics specialists, working with the Hungarian National Museum, has discovered a network of Avar pedigrees and community social practices after conducting a DNA study … Read more
Researchers studied landslides around the world, like the 2008 disaster in Beichuan, China, to develop a new paradigm for understanding their movements and failure types. Credit: Kushanav Bhuyan Landslides are one of the most destructive natural disasters on the planet, causing billions of dollars of damage and devastating loss of life every year. By introducing … Read more
Beyond DESI, a slew of new instruments are coming online in the coming years, including the 8.4-meter Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission. “Our data in cosmology has made enormous leaps over the last 25 years, and it’s about to make bigger leaps,” … Read more
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain The case of a Florida bottlenose dolphin found with highly pathogenic avian influenza virus, or HPAIV—a discovery made by University of Florida researchers in collaboration with multiple other agencies and one of the first reports of a constantly growing list of mammals affected by this virus—has been published in Communications Biology. … Read more
Illustration of some of the marine food items described in the scientific paper as umami-rich blue food. Credit: Jonas Drotner Mouritsen Greening the way we eat needn’t mean going vegetarian. A healthy, more realistic solution is to adopt a flexitarian diet where seafoods add umami to “boring” vegetables. University of Copenhagen gastrophysicist Ole G. Mouritsen … Read more
