Coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, Australia Nature Picture Library/Alamy Strategies to artificially shade Australia’s Great Barrier Reef from rising temperatures are urgently needed, scientists have warned, in light of new research that suggests changes to shipping fuels have increased the bleaching risk to the coral. The Great Barrier Reef has suffered…
The solar system’s newest visitor, 3I/ATLAS, may be 3 billion years older than the sun and its planets. First discovered on July 1, 3I/ATLAS is a rare interstellar object — only the third ever spotted. Since then, astronomers have been racing to uncover its origins. A new calculation predicts that 3I/ATLAS originated from a part…
Your Garbage Has a ‘Wild Afterlife’ on the International Black Market Alexander Clapp, author of new nonfiction book ‘Waste Wars,’ tracks the world-wide blackmarket trade of our garbage By Brianne Kane edited by Andrea Gawrylewski Sorting your trash and recycling is common practice: break down the cardboard boxes, separate the compostable material and plastics and…
The trajectory of interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS as it passes through the solar system NASA/JPL-Caltech An interstellar object currently passing through our solar system might be one of the oldest comets we have ever seen, originating from a star billions of years older than our own. Comet 3I/ATLAS was spotted earlier this month near the orbit…
McKenzie Prillaman is a science and health journalist based in Washington, DC. She holds a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience from the University of Virginia and a master’s degree in science communication from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She was the spring 2023 intern at Science News.
Many people fear that if fully sentient machine intelligence ever comes to exist, it will take over the world. The real threat, though, is the risk of tech companies enslaving robots to drive up profits, author Martha Wells suggests in her far-future-set book series The Murderbot Diaries. In Wells’s world, machine intelligences inhabit spaceships and…
The plasma near Jupiter’s poles is capable of unusual behaviour NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS; Oleksuik © CC NC SA The cosmic neighbourhood of Jupiter is one of the more peculiar places in the solar system, and the plasmas that reside there are no exception. They ripple with a never-before-seen type of wave. Robert Lysak at the University of…
Attacks on Higher Education Are Attacks on All Americans If Americans don’t fight back against efforts to dismantle higher education, the U.S. will lose lifesaving medical research, innovation that spurs our economy and the ability to freely study science and society By Matt Motta & Dominik Stecuła The John W. Weeks Bridge at Harvard University…
Sneezing and coughing are common hay fever symptoms mohammad hosein safaei/Unsplash People with hay fever could one day benefit from a first-of-its-kind “molecular shield” that blocks pollen from entering the lining of the nose, and is unlikely to cause the side effects seen with standard treatments. Hay fever is an allergic reaction that occurs when…
Ancient Tooth Proteins Rewrite the Rhino Family Tree—Are Dinosaurs Next? Molecules from the 20-million-year-old teeth of a rhino relative are among the oldest ever sequenced, opening tantalizing possibilities to scientists By Ewen Callaway & Nature magazine Rhinos’ evolutionary relationships became a little clearer with the sequencing of the oldest proteins yet. Researchers have described proteins…
