An international team of researchers analyzing the sounds captured by the Perseverance rover has determined the speed of sound on Mars. Baptiste Chide, with Los Alamos National Laboratory, gave a presentation (PDF) at this year’s 53rd Lunar and Planetary Science Conference outlining the findings by the team. […] Chide reported Read more…
Australia’s record-breaking wildfires of 2019 and 2020 blasted smoke so high that even the ozone layer in the stratosphere was damaged, a new analysis shows. The Black Summer bushfires, which raged along Australia’s east coast from November 2019 to January 2020, caused unprecedented destruction. The fires burned more than 70,000 Read more…
Limiters cap amount of electricity households can use, making many appliances unusable. From a report: Josie Gagne was stumbling in the dark, sobbing while on the phone with an Enmax customer assistant, as she tried to locate the tiny orange button under the utility meter that would restore heat inside. Read more…
Kenya’s great lakes are flooding, in a devastating and long-ignored environmental disaster that is displacing hundreds of thousands of people. One of the first scientists to realise that something was wrong with the lakes was a geologist named Simon Onywere. He came to the topic by accident. Between 2010 and Read more…
Abnormally hot air has hit both of the world’s poles at once, while the extent of Arctic sea ice appears to have been historically low this winter. Temperature records were broken in Antarctica as warm air swept unusually far into the heart of the continent. Concordia station, which is high Read more…
NASA JPL announced a cosmic milestone with the confirmed discovery of over 5,000 exoplanets (planets located outside our solar system). A new batch of 65 planets joined the NASA Exoplanet Archive on Monday, triggering a celebratory mood. “It’s not just a number,” Exoplanet Archive science lead Jessie Christiansen said in Read more…
“The coldest location on the planet has experienced an episode of warm weather this week unlike any ever observed, with temperatures over the eastern Antarctic ice sheet soaring 50 to 90 degrees above normal,” reports the Washington Post. “The warmth has smashed records and shocked scientists.” “This event is completely Read more…