Tag Archives: Carbon

While plate tectonics may not be absolutely necessary for life, they may be necessary for a technological civilization to arise. Habitability may be possible on a static world, but habitability probably won’t persist long enough for a technological civilization like ours to appear. Plate tectonics regulates our planet’s climate, and without it, atmospheric CO2 would rise to catastrophic levels. New …

Gold mining in Peru has moved into sensitive wetland areas and is releasing a lot of stored carbon. These wetlands are peatlands, waterlogged soils built from partly decayed plants that lock away carbon for centuries. Peat loss turns a slow natural carbon vault into a fast source of emissions. That is why scientists are sounding the alarm about new mining …

Experts estimate that the global production and disposal of plastics emits nearly 2 billion tons of greenhouse gases per year. The vast majority of these materials end up in landfills, but what if we could repurpose some of that waste to remove planet-warming emissions from the atmosphere? A team of researchers in Denmark has discovered a way to do just …

On July 1, 2025, the Deep Random Survey remote telescope in Chile, part of the ATLAS (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) project, spotted a new comet. But it wasn’t just any old comet: This one isn’t gravitationally bound by the sun, which means it originated outside of our solar system. Named 3I/ATLAS, the comet is only the third known interstellar …

Riahi, K. et al. in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Shukla, P. R. et al.) Ch. 3 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022); https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157926.005. Clarke, L. et al. in Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (eds Shukla, P. R. et al.) Ch. 6 (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2022); https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009157926.008. Kearns, J. et al. Developing a consistent database for regional …

The planet’s capacity to store carbon-dioxide emissions in rock formations is much smaller than previous estimates suggest and it could run out as early as 2200, according to a study1 published in Nature today. To meet the goal of the 2015 Paris agreement — limiting global warming to 1.5–2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures — vast amounts of CO2 will need …

The world has far fewer places to securely store carbon dioxide deep underground than previously thought, steeply lowering its potential to help stem global warming, according to a new study that challenges long-held industry claims about the practice. The study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that global carbon storage capacity was 10 times less than previous estimates after …

Jennifer Lopez embraced a Hamptons summer with her child Emme, sharing joyful family moments and serene snapshots on Instagram. Fresh from her sold-out “Up All Night: Live in 2025” tour, the singer is now promoting Bill Condon’s “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a $30 million musical opening October 10, in which she plays three roles. Produced partly by ex-husband Ben …

Researchers have been able to measure liquid carbon experimentally for the first time. They combined a high-power laser with the ultrashort X-ray laser flash of the European XFEL. Credit: HZDR / M. Künsting Researchers have completed a groundbreaking experiment at the European XFEL. An international team of scientists, led by the University of Rostock and the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), set …

Press enter or click to view image in full size Three images of 3I/ATLAS, taken by the SPHEREx Space Observatory. The images were observed at wavelengths of 3.0, 4.26, and 4.7 micrometers, corresponding to prominent emission lines of H2O, CO2 and CO gas, from left to right respectively. 3I/ATLAS is undetected in H2O and CO. By contrast, a bright CO2 …