Lasers have confirmed the big driver behind today’s rapidly rising sea levels. A new study reports that global mean sea level (GMSL) has climbed about 3.5 inches since 1993. What’s even more concerning is that the pace has increased dramatically in the last two decades. Roughly 60 percent of the rise coming from added water mass, and more …
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The back-to-back WNBA MVP is joining the fight against WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. Aces star A’Ja Wilson threw her support behind Lynx phenom Napheesa Collier after she ripped the league’s top executive for “the worst leadership in the world” and revealed controversial comments about Engelbert’s views on players’ worth, including Caitlin Clark. “I had an opportunity to listen to Phee, …
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We could be overlooking an entire population of asteroids that pose a threat to Earth on the very simple basis that they’re extremely hard to see. In the space shared by the orbit of Venus, hundreds of undiscovered asteroids could be orbiting the Sun, hidden from our view simply because of their position. Because they’re closer to the center of …
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An unknown bacterium, never before seen on our planet, has been discovered in the Chinese space station Tiangong. This discovery, worthy of science-fiction scenarios, raises new questions about life in orbit and microbiological risks. A different kind of space bacterium In May 2023, during a routine mission by the Shenzhou-15 crew, samples taken from a habitation module on the Chinese …
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In a world without plants or animals, microorganisms ruled Earth, and the Great Oxidation Event (GOE) marked a pivotal transformation. But how did life adapt when the once-toxic oxygen began to permeate the atmosphere? Researchers have uncovered new clues to this ancient transition in Japan’s iron-rich hot springs, revealing microbial ecosystems that mirror Earth’s conditions long before animals and plants …
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QUICK FACTS Where is it? Grand Erg Oriental, Sahara [30.13306820, 9.306920931] What’s in the photo? The stark contrast where a field of “star dunes” meets rocky hills Which satellite took the photo? EarthKAM camera, on board the International Space Station When was it taken? Oct. 31, 2017 This striking satellite image shows the stark difference between a giant field of …
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A new take on the origins of Earth’s water claims to reveal the composition of the Earth in the first few million years after it formed. This theory proposes the planet was dry before the collision that formed the Moon, which would make habitable Earth-like planets very much the exception, not the norm. The source for Earth’s vast oceans has …
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AI-generated illustration. Credit: ZME Science/Midjourney. Fire has always shaped the human story. Strike a match, watch the flare, and you’re tapping into something humans have relied on for at least 245,000 years. But despite its primal aura, fire is almost impossibly rare. It’s not just that Earth is the only place we’ve seen it — it may be the only …
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NASA’s Psyche has set a new benchmark for space communications. In December 2024, the spacecraft successfully beamed an infrared laser message back to Earth from a mind-boggling distance of 494 million kilometers (307 million miles). That’s more than twice the average distance between Earth and Mars and more than 1,285 times the distance to the Moon. It’s a triumph for …
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Launched as part of a mission to study the outer planets, Voyager 1 has now traversed a distance so vast that light itself—the fastest thing in the universe—would take 24 hours to cover it. The spacecraft has exceeded all expectations in both duration and distance, becoming a symbol of human persistence in exploring the cosmos. NASA’s engineers had originally intended …
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