Saturn’s moon Titan is a frigid hellscape by Earth standards, but it’s also one of the most hopeful spots for discovering alien life in our solar system. A new scientific paper hints that conditions on Titan’s surface might be favorable for the chemistry of life to emerge.
As if we needed more evidence that cephalopods are on the verge of a global uprising that will end in humanity’s destruction, our favorite tentacled invertebrates appear to have an insane visual system that allows them to perceive color despite being technically colorblind. This, along with distributed brains and the…
Celebrity cheese puff and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has a problem: climate change. Despite dismissing our global planetary crisis as a Chinese hoax, the real estate mogul’s prized real estate is directly in the line of fire. In thirty years, Tump’s Mar-a-Lago club could be under a foot…
Fourth of July celebrations along Florida’s Treasure Coast were decidedly muted yesterday, thanks to a putrid, toxic algae bloom that continues to fester days after Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency.
Phobos and Deimos, Mars’ lumpy, runty moons, were once pegged as captured asteroids. But the truth is shaping up to be far more interesting. These ruddy satellites could be the lone survivors of a giant impact that eviscerated half of Mars’ surface billions of years ago.
Before it powered down in preparation for the big engine burn last night, NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured some absolutely stunning footage of the four Galilean satellites in orbit around Jupiter.
Tonight is the night, my fellow space nerds. After five years and 445 million miles, NASA’s Juno mission is about to arrive at Jupiter, becoming the second spacecraft in history to orbit the gas giant. We hope.
After five years and 445 million miles, NASA’s Juno mission arrives in orbit around Jupiter on Monday to begin an unprecedented scientific study of the behemoth planet that shaped our solar system.
Steve Grasse wanted to make the best spirits in the world—so he followed the water. It led him to Tamworth, New Hampshire, a colonial-era township at the foothills of the White Mountains. The town drinks from the Ossippee aquifer, an underground labyrinth of granite-purified mountain water that’s never seen a trace of…
As NASA’s Juno mission continues to hurl itself toward Jupiter, the terrifying reality of flying close to the biggest and baddest planet in our solar system is starting to set in. Yesterday, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory dropped recordings the spacecraft created based on data it collected as it crossed Jupiter’s “bow…
Toward the end of the last ice age, Earth’s climate was a turbulent beast, warming up and chilling out again every 1,500 years. Research published today in Science links these abrupt temperature swings to changes ocean circulation, filling an important gap in our understanding of past climate change.
Nearly thirty years after an international treaty banned the use of chlorofluorocarbons, the Antarctic ozone hole is finally starting to heal. By mid to late century, it should be fully recovered.
If you want to see beautiful auroras, forget Alaska, Canada, and Iceland—check out Jupiter. At the gas giant’s north pole, the most powerful and luminous northern lights in the solar system shimmer and glow in an endless geomagnetic storm that’s larger than our entire planet.
Barring some incredible new carbon capture technology, the window for limiting global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius appears to have closed. That’s the stark conclusion of a report out in Nature today, which finds that the carbon reductions pledges penned into the Paris Agreement are ridiculously inadequate…
After months of rampant speculation, scientists announced late last year that the bright spots on dwarf planet Ceres are giant deposits of salt. Case closed, right? Not exactly. We’ve since gotten a better look at the spots, and the craters they reside in, and Ceres is shaping up to be a much weirder place than we…
Three hundred and sixty five million miles away sits a cloud of gas so large it weighs more than Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune combined. It’s so powerful it’s been accused of slinging entire planets into the sun, and so ancient it could hold the key to the origin of Earth.
On July 4th, NASA’s Juno spacecraft will arrive in orbit around Jupiter for a new scientific mission that seeks to solve the decades-long mystery of what lies beneath the gas giant’s swirling cloud tops. As the latest stunning image from the spacecraft’s approach shows, we’re getting really fucking close.
The United States, Canada, and Mexico are poised to announce an ambitious new energy pledge that would see 50 percent of North American electricity drawn from clean sources by 2025.
We’ve heard a lot of buzz recently about the Anthropocene, the geologic epoch of man and machine. Does it exist? Are we in it right now? Later this summer, the International Stratigraphic Union will convene and attempt to answer these weighty questions.
Did you know that it’s Shark Week? To kick it off, we thought we’d draw your attention to an under-appreciated group of sharks whose secret lives are now being revealed thanks to the wonders of satellite technology.
