What's up in
Science
Physics, climate, planetary science, and the research that shapes how we understand the universe and our place in it.
Most of NASA’s first Moon-base robots will depend on solar power, which makes the two-week lunar night one of the whole project’s nastiest problems — but NASA is now considering an odd workaround: sending PROMISE, a JPL engineering twin of its nuclear-powered Mars rovers, to the lunar south pole.
The most heavily militarized border on Earth, a hundred-and-fifty-mile strip of barbed wire and landmines cutting across the Korean Peninsula, has been sealed off from human contact for seventy years — and quietly become one of the most biodiverse wildlife refuges in Asia.
The unsettling possibility raised by quantum gravity is that time may not be a basic ingredient of reality. It may be something that emerges only inside the universe, from entanglement, entropy, and relationships between physical systems — while the deeper quantum structure underneath may have no ticking clock at all.
The universe appears to be expanding faster than our current model predicts — and James Webb has now strengthened the case that the discrepancy is real, not just a flaw in Hubble’s measurements.
When mountain lions began appearing more often on trail cameras at a small California nature preserve, coyotes and deer shifted away from nighttime activity, and the woody plants those deer used to eat increased sixty four fold
The blue whale is bigger than any dinosaur science has confirmed, and yet it is not a fossil or a record in a museum — it is a living, breathing, endangered animal that can still be seen from the California coast every summer
A Central African frog fights off predators by driving the sharp bones of its own toes out through its skin to form claws, a defense biologists first described in detail in 2008
A black coral colony discovered in the fjords of New Zealand has been growing for an estimated three to four centuries, and despite its name the living coral is actually white, with only its skeleton turning black
Earth reaches its farthest point from the Sun on July 6, in the middle of northern summer, and the backward timing is the clearest sign the seasons don't come from distance
We think of Mount Everest as the ultimate mountain, but Olympus Mons on Mars rises nearly three times as high and spreads across a footprint roughly the size of Italy, making Earth’s tallest peak look almost local by comparison.
