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...

This winter has brought a cold reminder that SARS-CoV-2 isn’t the only virus we need to think about. After two winters during which influenza was subdued by pandemic precautions, the last few months have shown that the flu is still a major public health threat that can overwhelm busy hospitals and cost thousands of lives. This flu season is no 100-year outbreak. But it’s the most...

(DENVER) — Exxon Mobil’s scientists were remarkably accurate in their predictions about global warming, even as the company made public statements that contradicted its own scientists’ conclusions, a new study says. The study in the journal Science Thursday looked at research that Exxon funded that didn’t just confirm what climate scientists were saying, but used more...

The universe was a busy place 11 to 12 billion years ago—or just 2 to 3 billion years after the Big Bang. That is the period astronomers refer to as the “cosmic noon,” when young galaxies were forming stars at a fast and furious rate. High noon for the cosmos has long since passed—or it would seem to have. But there is one pocket in which it persists. And, in another in a...

(DENVER) — Earth’s fever persisted last year, not quite spiking to a record high but still in the top five or six warmest on record, government agencies reported Thursday. But expect record-shattering hot years soon, likely in the next couple years because of “relentless” climate change from the burning of coal, oil and gas, U.S. government scientists said. Despite a La...

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is considering whether to regulate gas stoves due to health concerns from indoor air pollution.

Not a lot of people have heard of Spaceport Cornwall in the U.K., but last night more than 2,000 paying ticket holders showed up there to watch what was supposed to be the first orbital space launch from British soil. The payload: nine different satellites from both the military and the private sector. The launch company: Virgin Orbit, the U.S.-based operation owned by billionaire Richard...

A massive hurricane, a historic drought, and 16 other major disasters across the US collectively racked up $165 billion in damages and killed at least 474 people in 2022, according to a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) analysis published Tuesday. NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information track the biggest of the big disasters, each one costing at least $1...

From drought in Europe to floods in Pakistan and melting polar ice, a rapidly-changing climate made 2022 a year of new extremes fueled by a relentless increase in the concentration of heat-trapping gases, according to the EU agency that tracks changes to Earth’s atmosphere. The year ended as the world’s fifth-warmest on record, with Europe heating up faster than anywhere else, it...

(DENVER) — Earth’s protective ozone layer is slowly but noticeably healing at a pace that would fully mend the hole over Antarctica in about 43 years, a new United Nations report says. A once-every-four-years scientific assessment found recovery in progress, more than 35 years after every nation in the world agreed to stop producing chemicals that chomp on the layer of ozone in...