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…
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,…
