On Oct. 7, 1492, Christopher Columbus, aboard his ship the Santa María, had been at a complete standstill for 21 days, trapped in a very strange sea which he would later name the Sargasso Sea—sargazo in Spanish meaning “gulfweed.” Today, the Sargasso Sea—an elliptical expanse in the southwestern Atlantic at the center of which lies Bermuda—is six times the...

If you attend a college-level earth science class in Ohio in the coming years, you might learn about how climate change is causing heat waves, flooding, and record storms, and how humanity has a shrinking window to drastically cut emissions and forestall the worst effects. But your instructor could also be forced to spend a big chunk of time talking about how a few largely discredited...

History does not record who the weeping woman was who joined the giant crowd at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on Feb. 4, 1962. But she was inconsolable. “I know it’s silly to carry on this way,” she said with a hitching breath to a reporter from the Griffith Observer magazine. “But I can’t help myself.” The cause of her profound distress: On that...

Step aside, rat poison. A new oral contraceptive for rodents may be the answer to the world's infestations.

Keep an eye to the sky this week for a chance to see a planetary hangout. Five planets—Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars—will line up near the moon. Where and when can you see the 5 planets? The best day to catch the whole group is Tuesday. You’ll want to look to the western horizon right after sunset, said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. The planets will stretch from the...

Among many well-intentioned people working on the uneasy border between climate action and consumption-based capitalism, there’s long existed a consensus that consumers of everything from coffee to dry shampoo are basically rational creatures. If you can label which particular brand of toilet paper isn’t destroying the planet, you’ll help that bath tissue win in the...

The world faces an incredibly tricky land crunch over the coming decades. On the one hand, we want to protect more wildlife, having realized the critical role nature plays in limiting climate change and sustaining human life. On the other hand, we want to generate more energy than ever before for fast-developing countries in the Global South, and transition the entire world to renewables....

The astronomers operating the Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the island of Maui were not expecting to hit cosmic paydirt on Oct. 19, 2017—but they did. On what was otherwise an ordinary night of skygazing, they suddenly spotted what is easily the oddest comet ever detected. Its high speed—87 km per second (54 mi. per second)—and highly elliptical angle indicated that it originated...

The scariest part of a landmark new report on the science of climate change may be what scientists don’t know. On Monday, the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N.’s climate–science body, released the final volume in a series of reports outlining experts’ latest understanding of the science of climate change. The report declared the science of climate...

Venus had a lot going for it. Roughly the same diameter and density as Earth, it orbits in the solar system’s habitable zone—just the right distance from the sun for liquid water to exist. But the planet’s biological prospects were long ago wrecked by a runaway greenhouse effect that left it with an atmosphere that is 95% carbon dioxide, and 90 times the pressure of...

Geoengineering our atmosphere to cool the planet has long been a taboo subject. But as the earth keeps heating up, that may now be changing.

A new dog breed has waddled its way into Americans’ hearts. While Labrador retrievers were the most popular purebred dog for a record 31 years, French bulldogs—or “frenchies” as they’re called by enthusiasts—took the top spot in 2022 for the first time, the American Kennel Club announced on March 15. But the selection doesn’t come without some...

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday proposed limiting the amount of harmful “forever chemicals” in drinking water to the lowest level that tests can detect, a long-awaited protection the agency said will save thousands of lives and prevent serious illnesses, including cancer. The plan marks the first time the EPA has proposed regulating a toxic group of compounds that are...

Many residents of East Palestine, Ohio, are suspicious of the environmental contractor Norfolk Southern has brought in to measure chemical exposures following last month’s massive train derailment, toxic spill, and chemical burn off. Over the last decade, the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) has become the go-to contractor for corporations looking to follow up on...

Sixty-six years ago, there was just a single human-built object in Earth orbit. It was Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s—and the world’s—first satellite, launched on Oct. 4, 1957. Now take a moment and try to guess how many objects—including active satellites, defunct satellites, and bits of debris from all of that space traffic—are currently circling the planet....

Chances are, you haven’t yet made your plans for Valentine’s day 2046. But just in case you’re thinking about it, you may want to make sure you spend the day indoors. That, at least, is the take home message from NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, which earlier this week sounded the alarm via Twitter that in just under 23 years, a newly discovered asteroid...

The pandemic created a window for many to re-evaluate their attitudes toward time itself. Now we’ll find out if what we learned will stick.

It’s no secret that air pollution is a serious problem facing the world today. Just how serious? A new study on global daily levels of air pollution shows that hardly anywhere on Earth is safe from unhealthy air. About 99.82% of the global land area is exposed to levels of particulate matter 2.5 (PM2.5) — tiny particles in the air that scientists have linked to lung cancer and heart...

Greenhouse gas emissions from the way humans consume food could add nearly 1 degree of warming to the Earth’s climate by 2100, according to a new study. Continuing the dietary patterns of today will push the planet past the 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit of warming sought under the Paris climate agreement to avoid the worst effects of climate change, according to the...

If you haven’t heard the name Alex Murdaugh over the course of the past few months, you may just not have been paying attention. The disgraced South Carolina attorney was convicted yesterday of the murder of his wife and son, following a six-week trial that was must-watch TV for much of the nation. Cable news carried Murdaugh’s testimony live and uninterrupted as it unfolded. In its...

In case you’re counting, the average American will go through 26 kg (57 lbs) of toilet paper in a single year. Multiply that by the 332 million people in the U.S. and you get more than 19 billion pounds of waste paper being flushed away annually. All by itself that represents a massive disposal and sanitation challenge. But now, according to a paper just published in Environmental Science...

When most people think about the jet stream, if they think about it at all, it’s usually in the context of the high-altitude, fast moving wind currents of the northern hemisphere that enable speedy west-to-east long-haul flights. But the polar jet stream also plays a major role in our daily lives: the weaker it gets, the wackier our weather is, from the Texan deep freeze of 2021 to the...

Having systematically colonized the ranks of government, academia, and media—including malleable-minded climate writers like yours truly—the dark legions of the World Economic Forum (WEF) have reportedly gotten around to their real work: employing their techno-fascist designs on traffic patterns in Oxford, U.K. Or that’s what some people on the internet are saying, anyway. A...

Debates over the benefits and pitfalls of different diets have been around as long as, well, the diets themselves. Is the ketogenic diet a good way to lose weight, or a carb-free trip to bad health? Are vegetarians missing out on vital vitamins? What, exactly, is the omnivore’s dilemma? Can vegans eat sugar? And do paleo adherents actually know what our ancient ancestors ate? A study...

The record-breaking heat Earth endured during the summer of 2022 will be repeated without a robust international effort to address climate change, a panel of scientists warned Monday. Heat-related deaths, wildfires, extreme rainfall, and persistent drought are expected to become increasingly severe as both ocean and atmospheric temperatures continue to rise, the experts said. Even if all...

At the Munich Security Conference last week, George Soros got onstage to talk about the existential risk that climate change poses to human civilization, as well as what appeared to be the 92-year-old Hungarian-American billionaire’s preferred method of addressing it: brightening the clouds over the Arctic to reflect the sun’s energy away from the melting ice caps. But questions...

It isn’t easy to build a galaxy. The universe is a good 13.8 billion years old and the earliest galaxies ever detected—spotted by the James Webb Space telescope last November—did not form until 350 million years after the Big Bang. Not only did that infant universe take its time bringing forth its first galactic masses, it also didn’t build very big ones once it got...

Often derided and the topic of many a teacher’s report card comment daydreaming, or mind-wandering, is generally seen as an undesirable activity, especially among school-age children from whom the education system demands unrelenting focus. “Monica likes to daydream,” notes home to my Mom would read. “I do wonder what she is thinking about.” And yet, on average, we...

By now, you’ve probably heard about “zombie fungi”, which are able to puppet the behaviour of their insect hosts with magnificent precision. One such fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects carpenter ants. Once infected by the fungus, ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights and climb up the nearest plant. In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamp its...

There’s no way of knowing—at least not yet—everything the Chinese spy balloon that was shot down off the coast of South Carolina on Feb. 4 saw during its slow drift across the U.S. It flew over populated and unpopulated areas, cities and military sites. While it may not have caught a glimpse of you during its journeys, you have no idea what it did capture. If that makes you a...

If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an ant. In fact, it is exceedingly likely that you’re human. Perhaps you’re a construction worker, laying bricks for a new high-rise building downtown. Or maybe you’re a parent, engaged in a near futile struggle to lay your howling baby to rest each night. You could even be an office worker, toiling away each day for the...

There is a reason Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is often referred to by its supervillain moniker. ‘Doomsday Glacier’ better sums up the consequences should the Florida-size slab of ice collapse due to rising temperatures: a global sea level rise of more than 2 ft., enough to wipe out low-lying island nations and many of the world’s major coastal cities. But while drastic,...

Plants are searching out cooler places to grow in North America. But studies suggest they are struggling to keep up with climate change.

For two weeks in August, a crew of workers systematically confiscated every orange in Vince Bernard’s groves in Valley Center, Calif. They buried the oranges—at least $500,000 worth of fruit, Bernard says—in ditches on his neighbor’s property. They did so by order of the U.S. government, which came accompanied by armed California Highway Patrol officers and which did not...

Ever since Feb. 4, when the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, the military has been in something like skeet-shooting mode, blasting three more unidentified aerial objects out of the sky on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (Feb. 10, 11, and 12). The first of the three, spotted by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) radar over the northern coast of...

In mid-January, threatening social media messages started showing up on the accounts of a small New Jersey organization devoted to rescuing ocean mammals that wash up on the beach. Some said “we’re watching you.” Others accused staff of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center (MMSC) being “whale murderers.” Some people wrote that they were going to show up at the...

There’s a very good reason NASA planners chose Mars’s Gale Crater as the landing site for the Curiosity Rover when it touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 2012. Gale Crater was once Gale Lake, a brimming body of water that could have given rise to microbial life in the first billion years of Martian history, before the planet lost most of its atmosphere and water to space....

If you want to get to the moon, you need a mega rocket. NASA’s got one, in the form of the Space Launch System (SLS), a 32-story monster with a record setting 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs.) of thrust. The rocket launched on its maiden voyage in November, placing an uncrewed Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit—a mission dubbed Artemis I. Crewed missions are set to follow soon; the...

Bird flu appears to be on the move. A particularly nasty strain of the H5N1 virus is currently causing the worst outbreak of the disease among birds since it was first identified in China in 1996. Europe is deep into its second commercial season of widespread contagion, and the U.S. is seeing its deadliest 12-month period for poultry in recorded history, with 58 million animals affected so far....

PFAS, also known as "forever chemicals" have been detected in tampons, pads, period underwear, and more. Experts worry about health risks.

As glaciers melt and pour massive amounts of water into nearby lakes, 15 million people across the globe live under the threat of a sudden and deadly outburst flood, a new study finds. More than half of those living in the shadow of the disaster called glacial lake outburst floods are in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China, according to a study in Tuesday’s Nature...

Folks around NASA don’t much care for this time of year. It was 56 years ago last week—January 27, 1967—that astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in a launch pad fire inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft as they were running a dress rehearsal for countdown. It was 37 years ago—on January 28, 1986—that the shuttle Challenger exploded...

Environmentalists say the Brazilian navy's plan to abandon a massive aircraft carrier is a disaster for marine life.

One of the most overlooked sources of carbon emissions comes from the food we eat. In the United States, greenhouse gasses from agriculture make up 11% of total emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Slightly more than half of that comes from farming and land clearing. The rest comes from the meat and dairy industry, largely in the form of methane from cattle burps and...

There was no Palomar Observatory when the object now known as comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) made its last close approach to Earth 50,000 years ago. There were mastodons and woolly mammoths, and great swaths of glaciers covering portions of North America and northern Europe, as the planet went through its last ice age. But there were no trained skygazers. Now, the ghostly green comet, spotted last year...

Fifty-five years ago, a sentient super­computer struck fear into millions of moviegoers with a chilling phrase: “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” The trope of artificial intelligence (AI) as the plot twist in Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic dystopia 2001: A Space Odyssey is entertaining; the reality is far more mundane, yet crucial. We must...

Our cells, each composed of 100 trillion atoms made of particles from the Big Bang, are filled with all kinds of structures. These include organelles—little factories like energy-producing mitochondria—and tiny molecular machines like ATP synthase, whose rotor and shaft spin at up to 300 rpm to produce ATP, the molecules that transmit energy in our cells. The interior of our cells...

Recent diet trends have promised that clocks are as important for weight loss as scales. One such diet is known as intermittent fasting, which entails a schedule of alternating fasting and eating. A popular intermittent fasting schedule is time-restricted eating. By restricting eating to a limited number of hours a day, some proponents of this diet argue people can harness their bodies’...

Make Sunsets, a company behind a recent controversial effort to cool the earth by releasing particles of sulfur dioxide (SO2) into the upper atmosphere to reflect incoming heat, is canceling its upcoming experiments in Mexico, following a rebuke from the Mexican government. “We have decided not to do launches in Mexico until we come up with a way to collaborate with the Mexican...