Our coastal forest showed little effect from the first 10-hour exposure to salty water in June 2022 and grew normally for the rest of the year. We increased the exposure to 20 hours in June 2023, and the forest still appeared mostly unfazed, although the tulip poplar trees were drawing water from the soil more…
After the first 20 minutes, the water temperature seemed to increase at a fairly constant rate of 0.0006 degrees Celsius per second. This increase in temperature means there is an increase in thermal energy, which we can calculate as: Here m is the mass of the stuff (in this case, water), and C is the…
As the rate of humanity’s data creation increases exponentially with the rise of AI, scientists have been interested in DNA as a way to store digital information. After all, DNA is nature’s way of storing data. It encodes genetic information and determines the blueprint of every living thing on earth. And DNA is at least…
At 06:59 Central European time time on January 8, the BepiColombo spacecraft successfully performed its sixth flyby of Mercury, the innermost planet in the solar system. This was a “gravity assist maneuver,” a move that used Mercury’s gravitational pull to alter the BepiColombo vehicle’s course, which will bring it into orbit around the planet by…
Many people see space exploration as a waste of resources. Of course, there is the counterargument that scientific discoveries have intrinsic cultural value, that space-related initiatives often boost international cooperation, or that the space sector has crucial technological and economic importance. But the most effective argument might simply be to point to the plethora of…
Far above your head, constellations of satellites are working constantly to provide the positioning, navigation, and timing systems that quietly run modern life. Known as the global navigation satellite system, or GNSS, signals from these satellites provide the foundation for mobile networks, energy grids, the internet, and GPS. And increasingly, their dependability is under threat….
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Dry conditions across Southern California in early January 2025 set the stage for a series of deadly wind-driven wildfires that burned thousands of homes and other structures in the Los Angeles area. Ming Pan, a hydrologist at the University of California-San Diego’s Center…
Hot on the tail of the Quadrantids meteor shower, another spectacle in the sky is about to arrive: comet Atlas C/2024 G3, which will reach perihelion—the point of its orbit closest to the sun—on January 13. On the same day, we will also see it at its closest point to Earth, and it could become…
The second is whether we’re continuing to deal more and more people into the transformation. We’ve got over 100,000 farmers and ranchers that are now taking on climate-smart agricultural practices. Will that climate action, that distributed climate action, continue to expand? The last thing is how good are we at building the stuff we need…
Lloyd and his wife later bought another home in Hidden Valley Lake, a town that has taken ambitious steps to reduce flammable vegetation, but their insurance premium is still more than $4,500 a year, more than triple what it was on their last home in Kansas. Lloyd is worried that his insurance company will hike…
