CLIMATE SCIENCE Space station carbon mapper faces demise An orbiting fridge-size sensor that uses lasers to map forest structure—key to understanding how much carbon trees sequester—is set to plummet to a fiery destruction in the atmosphere in 2023 unless NASA extends its tenure. Researchers and some U.S. Congress members are lobbying the...
When American novelist Kurt Vonnegut addressed the Bennington College class of 1970—1 year after publishing his best-selling novel, Slaughterhouse-Five —he hit the crowd with his signature one-two punch. “I fully expected that by the time I was 21, some scientist … would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics...
When Vanderbilt University neuroscientist and physician Matthew Schrag went public earlier this year with concerns about apparently doctored images in scores of Alzheimer’s papers—including seminal research underpinning one aspect of the dominant amyloid hypothesis of the disease—he anticipated that his motives and analyses would be dissected. “I also expected every project that I...
When it comes to the size of black holes, there’s a conspicuous gap in the middle. Astronomers have discovered dozens of small ones and tens of gargantuan ones, but only a handful of midsize ones. Now, researchers have added another potential midsize black hole to the pile, and it’s ravenous: In a distant dwarf galaxy, astronomers have caught this cosmic beast in the act of...
Incorporated inside and outside buildings—even in windows—new panels could help expand green energy potential