A new USDA report finds forests could become a major emitter of carbon by 2070 CLIMATEWIRE | U.S. forests could worsen global warming instead of easing it because they are being destroyed by natural disasters and are losing their ability to absorb planet-warming gases as they get older, aContinue Reading
Two ways of looking at mass match, squaring with theories of Newton and Einstein Physicists have three different definitions of mass, all thought to be equivalent. Measurements of the distance between Earth and the moon confirm that two of those masses are one and the same to higher precision thanContinue Reading
The facts behind one of the most famous disasters in history The air was buzzing with excitement ahead of the launch of the RMS Titanic on April 10, 1912. The new ship was the largest moving human-made object in the world. It had a number of innovative features, including remotelyContinue Reading
A new pill could be the first to help the more than 14 million people in the U.S. who struggle to control their marijuana use For people who find themselves unable to control their cannabis consumption, treatment options are limited. The Food and Drug Administration has not approved any medicationsContinue Reading
The book explores the tumultuous history of a blood-clotting invention The average human body holds about 5 liters of blood. Lose a liter, and you may go into shock. Lose two more, and you’ll probably die. For doctors treating traumatic injuries, keeping a patient’s blood in their body is “oneContinue Reading
Juvenile great white sharks are near to people in Southern California nearly every day but rarely bite them. Humans and juvenile great white sharks swim in the same waters nearly every single day along some beaches in southern California, a new study has found. Yet bites remain rare. “I thinkContinue Reading
Glaciologists bored 500 meters through the Kamb Ice Stream to access the cavern The coastal plain of the Kamb Ice Stream, a West Antarctic glacier, hardly seems like a coast at all. Stand in this place, 800 kilometers from the South Pole, and you see nothing but flat ice extendingContinue Reading
The Fermi bubbles may have started life as jets of high-energy charged particles MINNEAPOLIS — Bubbles of radiation billowing from the galactic center may have started as a stream of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, positrons, new observations suggest. An excess of positrons zipping past Earth suggests that the bubblesContinue Reading
Astronomers used gravitational lensing and supercomputers to identify the colossal black hole, which is among the largest ever found. Astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes ever found — an ultramassive monster roughly 30 billion times the mass of the sun — using a space-time trick predicted byContinue Reading
There are big, open scientific questions about levels of exposure and toxicity Tiny particles of plastic have been found everywhere — from the deepest place on the planet, the Mariana Trench, to the top of Mount Everest. And now more and more studies are finding that microplastics, defined as plasticContinue Reading