Science

All over the world, industrial sand mining is extracting river sediment much, much faster than Earth’s natural cycles can replenish it. Our rivers are, quite literally, running out of sand. Scientists have just published a massive review of 411 studies conducted since 1974, revealing that the global demand for river sand and gravel to create

Eating meat is consistently shown to be one of the worst things we can do for the environment as consumers, due to the outsized negative impacts animal agriculture has on land, water and energy use, and greenhouse gas emissions. Despite this, people all over the world continue to eat meat, due to taste preferences, cultural

WASHINGTON — Blue Origin has traced the explosion of its New Glenn rocket during a static-fire test in May to a valve in the rocket’s BE-4 engine, an issue that could also affect United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur. In an Aug. 5 statement on social media, Blue Origin Chief Executive Dave Limp said the investigation

Just over a hundred years ago, the Binet IQ test was developed in France and soon after, brought to the United States, where it was given to public school kids, physicians, and immigrants at Ellis Island. From the 1930s, IQ scores seemed to be inching up – with each new generation scoring a little higher

In April 2029, a rare visitor is going to swing through near-Earth space. Asteroid 99942 Apophis – a chunk of space rock around 370 meters (1,210 feet) long – is going to sail past within hailing distance, less than 32,000 kilometers (20,000 miles) from Earth. Scientists have crunched, and re-crunched, and crunched the numbers again

The cracks in parched soils are only a superficial, if harrowing, sign of drought. To fully understand the impact of long-lasting droughts made worse by climate change, scientists need to know what’s happening deep underground – in the world’s aquifers. These sponge-like freshwater reservoirs supply water for communities, agriculture, and surface ecosystems. But if there’s

SAN FRANCISCO – Rubicon Space Systems completed hot-fire testing of its Velox 5-newton ASCENT monopropellant thruster, paving the way for on-orbit operations in 2027. “The program demonstrated performance beyond our design objectives,” Rubicon Director Daniel Cavender told SpaceNews. “We are now transitioning the thruster into flight production.” The Velox thruster, fueled with ASCENT, a hydrazine replacement,

Driving while listening to the radio; making breakfast while talking to the family; eating a sandwich while reading a book. Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them? Well, it depends. The science shows it’s the latter, for cognitively

It’s hard to picture two more similar yet different worlds than Earth and Venus. Our own world is lush, wet, and vibrant, teeming with life and geological activity. Venus, by contrast, is like an evil twin. It shares DNA with Earth – the two worlds have more or less the same size, density, and mineral

Hike through Death Valley, a desert basin in California and parts of Nevada, and you’re guaranteed to see wall-to-wall colorful geology. But it’s also well-known for being the lowest, driest, and hottest place in North America.  By hottest, that means that not only do normal daily temps hit 49 °C (120 °F) in the summer,

WASHINGTON — The Air Force Research Laboratory has added $11.7 million to a Blue Origin contract aimed at exploring how commercial rockets could be used to transport military supplies around the world, expanding the agreement to about $13 million. The modification, announced on July 31, builds on a roughly $1.3 million contract awarded to the

Long before we had smartphones and electric lights, hardly anyone slept through the night. It wasn’t a big deal. Across many documented cultures, people went to bed a few hours after sunset, woke somewhere around midnight, stayed up for an hour or so – chatting, tending the fire, visiting neighbors – then drifted into a

Black holes are sneaky. Unless they light up their surroundings with a rare feeding frenzy, it’s very difficult to tell that they are there. That makes it hard to know exactly how many invisible stellar-mass black holes our galaxy contains. Now, astronomers have simulated the Milky Way to find its hidden “Galactic Underworld”, estimating that

Our planet clearly has a microplastics problem: These tiny synthetic fragments are finding their way into ancient rocks, human bones, and almost every species of animal on Earth. Now they’ve been discovered in one of the most remote, inhospitable, and unexplored parts of our planet. Researchers led by a team from the Korea Research Institute

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Space Force awarded K2 Space a $22.9 million contract to test laser terminals designed to transmit data directly between satellites in orbit. Under the contract announced July 31, K2 Space will procure, integrate, launch and operate two Enterprise Space Terminals, with each terminal carried as a hosted payload on a separate

Did you (or someone you know) have a period come late, twice, or not at all in June? If so, you are not alone. Across social media, thousands of women and people who menstruate reported having weird periods in June.  Some said it was the first time in their life that they’d experienced having a

The curious case of the solar system’s missing silver has had scientists scratching their heads for years. Why do ancient meteorite fragments contain much more silver than the Sun, if they were formed at the same time, some 4.6 billion years ago? If they formed at the same time, from the same swirling mass of

There’s nobody who wants to hear some good news about coral reefs more than me. I celebrated my ninth birthday in Florida by snorkeling on an offshore reef with my grandma, and I never forgot the dazzling fish and vibrant corals. Fifteen years later I returned, eager to share it with my partner, only to

WARSAW, Poland — The Spanish government announced it will allocate between 1.6 billion and 2 billion euros ($1.8 to $2.3 billion) to develop a national military satellite communications constellation that could be integrated into the planned IRIS² multi-orbit satellite internet constellation. The project was presented during the July 29 meeting of Spain’s National Committee for

Smallpox is an age-old scourge with a terrible history. Caused by the variola virus, it’s thought to have been responsible for some 4 million total deaths in Indigenous communities in the Americas after European colonizers arrived – communities with no immune protection against the virus. Previously, the evidence for this has been a historical paper

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is one of humanity’s greatest gifts to itself, revealing our cosmic surrounds like never before. The telescope’s revolutionary infrared sensitivity makes it perfectly suited to probing the most pertinent cosmic questions. Besides exploring the earliest eras of the Universe, JWST is being increasingly used to study alien atmospheres in

If a scientific innovation can address one of our most pressing environmental problems, it’s a fantastic achievement. If it can help solve two – even better. A new study details a method for converting three of the most commonly used plastics into hydrogen, a fuel that has the potential to be a clean and abundant

SAN FRANCISCO – Sophia Space announced the award July 30 of a patent, shared with the California Institute of Technology, covering large, modular space-based data centers. The patent, issued July 14, covers the architecture for a modular, scalable, passively cooled, computing and data storage unit designed for assembly into large computing data centers powered by

Today, the Amazon rainforest is revered as one of Earth’s most immaculate wildernesses. Nearly 2,000 years ago, it looked very different. Between around 600 BCE and 850 CE, a civilization known as the Aquiry transformed swaths of southwestern Amazonia, carving enigmatic geometric earthworks into the landscape. Now, a new LIDAR survey suggests that civilization was

Whatever astronomers glimpsed during a brief observation of Venus in 2010 was not supposed to be there. During a chance 36-minute observation on an exceptionally clear evening, an experimental instrument recorded something in the planet’s atmosphere that had never been seen before. Vast, concentric rings were encircling much of the planet’s day side, completely invisible

Forty percent of the world’s insect species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades, mainly because of habitat loss, pollution, pathogens, introduced species, and climate change. Artificial light at night is included among those stressors, because it disrupts the natural behaviors of insects. More than 60 percent of invertebrates are nocturnal, so any

WASHINGTON — A spacecraft launched nearly a month ago in a high-risk bid to boost the orbit of a NASA astrophysics satellite is suffering from attitude control problems that could jeopardize its mission. In a July 28 update posted on social media, Katalyst Space Technologies said its Link spacecraft, launched July 3, was in a

Around 7,500 spoken and signed languages are used worldwide today. Yet this extraordinary diversity may represent only a fraction of the linguistic richness humanity once possessed. A new modeling study published in Science suggests language diversity reached a forgotten golden age between 1,000 and 3,000 years ago, when tens of thousands of languages may have

Somewhere in the Universe, an alien culture may have developed the technology to build giant megastructures around stars, harnessing their energy on an unimaginable scale. First proposed in 1960 by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, the Dyson sphere has become one of the most enduring symbols of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. This is because such

Every year, millions of dry metric tons of biosolids – the nutrient-rich stuff left over from municipal sewage treatment, aka sludge – are applied to US soils. It’s a marvel of nutrient recycling, and a great way to source fertilizer, for sure. For many years, these biosolids have been marketed to farmers as a natural