Basecamp researchers gathering genetic data in Malta Greg Funnell A British biotech firm called Basecamp Research has spent the past few years collecting troves of genetic data from microbes living in extreme environments around the world, identifying more than a million species and nearly 10 billion genes new to science. It claims that this massive…
Wind and Solar Energy Are Cheaper Than Electricity from Fossil-Fuel Plants Even without subsidies, renewable energy is staying competitive with power from gas and coal By Benjamin Storrow & E&E News CLIMATEWIRE | Renewable energy doesn’t need subsidies to compete with fossil fuels when it comes to building new power plants. That’s a key takeaway…
Rockets could carry cooling aerosols to high altitudes Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images Reusable rockets that deliver sun-reflecting aerosols to the top of the stratosphere could cool the planet – with fewer negative side effects than lower-altitude solar geoengineering. But a fleet of climate-cooling rockets would come with its own downsides. The rise in global average temperatures…
Scientists Find Universe’s Missing Matter in Intergalactic ‘Cosmic Fog’ Researchers have used cosmic explosions called fast radio bursts to illuminate the intergalactic medium By Robert Lea & SPACE.com Astronomers have long struggled to see and study the dilute, dark gas and dust between galaxies, depicted in this artist’s concept as blue and purple filaments in…
Neural activity gets fired up in different parts of the brain when we recall a memory Nopparit/Getty Images Even memories that we have forgotten seem to guide our actions, which could tell us more about how they are stored in the brain. “People intuitively think of memory as something we can recall and wax poetic…
Since the Scopes trial in 1925, Science News has reported on legislative attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution.
Meeaaaoow rises like a question mark before dawn. Anyone living with a cat knows their sounds: broken chirrups like greetings, low growls that warn, purrs stitched into sleepy conversation. Ethologists have organized feline sounds that share acoustic and contextual qualities into more than 20 groupings, including the meow, the hiss, the trill, the yowl and…
Atomic DreamsRebecca Tuhus-DubrowAlgonquin Books, $30 Toxic sludge. A glowing radioactive rat. A three-eyed fish named “Blinky.” These are scenes from a 1990 episode of the long-running television show The Simpsons, in which protagonist and oaf Homer is a safety inspector at the fictional Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. The imagined horrors of the plant reflect concerns…
World’s Biggest Digital Camera Will Release Its First Photos of the Night Sky. How to Watch Live The first images of the cosmos taken by the world’s largest digital camera onboard the Vera Rubin Observatory are about to be released to the public. Here’s how to watch the action live By Stephanie Pappas edited by…
RFK, Jr., Fires CDC Vaccine Panel, Oceans Are Acidifying, and Pangolins Face Newly Understood Threat Major changes hit a key CDC vaccine advisory panel, ocean acidification crosses a critical threshold, and new research reveals an unexpected threat to pangolins. By Rachel Feltman, Lauren J. Young, Fonda Mwangi & Alex Sugiura Anaissa Ruiz Tejada/Scientific American This…
