On the morning of January 7, the first of Los Angeles’ vast wildfires broke out in a forested area near Topanga State Park on the northwest edge of the city. Conditions allowed the blaze to spread very quickly: 100 mph winds, very low humidity, and a landscape primed to burn after months without rainfall together…
Europa’s orbit is an ellipse, and the satellite’s shape is affected by Jupiter’s gravity, becoming deformed when it passes closer to Jupiter. This change in shape creates friction inside Europa, generating enormous amounts of heat in a mechanism known as tidal heating, which melts some of the ice and forms a vast internal ocean beneath…
THIS ARTICLE IS republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Humans have long wrestled with their conscience about killing and eating animals. The “meat paradox” (the conflict between people’s preference for meat and their concern for animals) may have inspired cave paintings from 37,000 years ago. Since then, many leading thinkers have eschewed…
This year will mark a turning point in humanity’s relationship with the moon, as we begin to lay the foundations for a permanent presence on its surface, paving the way for our natural satellite to become an industrial hub—one that will lead us to Mars and beyond. Developing a lunar economy boils down to three…
Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral Reopened It’s been a tumultuous year in French politics, but there was at least some good news at the end of 2024: After being badly damaged by a fire in its roof-space in 2019, Notre Dame reopened its doors in December after five years of repair and renovation works. The cathedral…
It gets better. What if B is also anchored to a quantum object that’s in a superposition of two locations? Then A’s quantum state is now smeared out in two different ways, depending on the possible locations of B. Because determining B’s quantum state determines A’s state, A and B are now entangled. Renato Renner,…
If current global trends are correct, in 2025, around 41 million people will die from noncommunicable diseases (NCDs)—which include cancer, heart disease, diabetes, chronic respiratory illness, and severe mental illness—representing around 74 percent of all deaths globally. Despite major advances in medicine over the past few decades, the numbers dying from NCDs are still on…
Courtesy of Rhett Allain But what about the colors from a video projector? It essentially does the same thing. However, instead of a bunch of tiny RGB lights, it projects RGB colors to different locations on the screen. Projecting the Color Black Now we’re ready for the fun stuff. How does a video projector shoot…
Do you think they’re still doing a good job? I do. I think they’ve changed the narrative. I think they’ve taken something that was a threat to them and they’ve characterized it in a way that’s negative. And I think that people believe it, so I think it was effective. Yeah. I’m in the UK,…
Although the details remain in flux, the transition team reviewing NASA and its activities has begun to draft potential executive orders for changes to space policy under the Trump Administration. Sources familiar with the five people on the team, who have spent the last six weeks assessing the space agency and its exploration plans, were…
