The Planet (on, and off)

NPR reports that astronomers have spotted a black hole finally “burping” out energy from a star that it swallowed back in 2018: How unusual is this? “Super unusual,” Yvette Cendes, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard and Smithsonian and lead author of the paper, tells NPR. “We’ve never Read more…

Remember the MICROSCOPE satellite ? In 2017, based on its first results, scientists were able to confirm Einstein’s equivalence principle (a key assumption in General Relativity) to unprecedented precision. Recently, they were able to improve precision by almost another order of magnitude by using all the data. Fortunately (or not) Read more…

“For the last century the biggest bar fight in science has been between Albert Einstein and himself,”: On one side is the Einstein who in 1915 conceived general relativity, which describes gravity as the warping of space-time by matter and energy. That theory predicted that space-time could bend, expand, rip, Read more…

In a major blow to America’s seafood industry, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers. While restaurant menus will suffer, scientists worry what the sudden population plunge Read more…

Global animal populations are declining, and we’ve got limited time to try to fix it. From a report: That’s the upshot of a new report from the World Wildlife Fund and the Zoological Society of London, which analyzed years of data on thousands of wildlife populations across the world and Read more…

Greece was powered entirely by renewables for the first time ever last week, according to the country’s independent power transmission operator (IPTO). On Monday, IPTO said that renewables accounted for 100% of power generation in Greece for at least five hours, reaching a record high of 3,106 megawatt hours at Read more…