For over a decade, floating cranes have been lowering a strange cargo some 3000 metres under the Mediterranean Sea. The objects look otherworldly: large, shiny spheres crammed with electronics. They are, in fact, detectors for a machine called KM3NeT, designed to search for one of the most mysterious fundamental particles. The machine is still several…
Scientists aboard a research vessel near Los Angeles collected ash, air and water samples as fire blazed on the hills before them in January.
Trump’s NOAA Has Downplayed an Alarming Finding: CO₂ Surged Last Year Under the Trump administration, NOAA has minimized an announcement that climate-warming carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere grew at a record-breaking speed in 2024 By Chelsea Harvey & E&E News Volumetric visualization of the total carbon dioxide (CO₂) on a global scale added on…
Hominins have been using fire for various reasons for at least 1 million years SHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Mastering fire may have also led to genetic changes that helped early humans survive mild burn injuries, but this evolutionary trait could complicate the treatment of more severe cases today. An early-stage study suggests that the selection…
WASHINGTON — When traces of H5N1 bird flu showed up in cow’s milk last year, it raised fears that the virus could become more infectious to humans. So far, that hasn’t happened, virologist Richard Webby reported April 23 at the World Vaccine Congress Washington. Cows were surprise hosts for the virus. Influenza viruses latch on…
Rachel Feltman: Happy Monday, listeners! For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. I was out of the office taking a little break last week, so I didn’t have the chance to write and record our usual news roundup. Instead, I thought it would be fun to dive back into the Scientific American archives for…
Tabular icebergs are breaking away from the ice shelves of Antarctica James Kirkham City-sized icebergs once drifted past the coast of Britain when ice sheets covering much of northern Europe were in rapid retreat about 18,000 to 20,000 years ago. James Kirkham at the British Antarctic Survey and his colleagues have found the preserved scour…
The world’s first piloted flight of an electric aircraft driven by liquid hydrogen has been successfully achieved, according to H2FLY, a developer of hydrogen-electric powertrain systems for aircraft based in Stuttgart, Germany. During its flight test campaign, the H2FLY team conducted four flights using liquid hydrogen, one of which was over three hours long. The…
A new estimate using sheet modeling finds that Greenland’s rate of ice loss this century could outpace that of any century over the past 12,000 years, when the last Ice Age ended. Scientists used reconstructions of ancient climate to drive the model, and validated the model against real-world measurements of the ice sheet’s contemporary and ancient…
Across the world, loneliness tends to increase after midlife. But for reasons that aren’t altogether clear, the United States is an outlier, with loneliness steadily decreasing from the middle to later years of life, researchers report April 22 in Aging and Mental Health. Most attention and policies addressing loneliness in the United States target the…
