The Planet on, and off.
The City of Austin released a memo saying that Samsung released as much as 763,000 gallons of sulfuric acid waste into a Northeast Austin creek over a period as long as 106 days. They confirmed the leak has stopped, but no fish or macro invertebrates survived in the impacted area. Read more…
Astronomers said this week that a piece of a Falcon 9 rocket that was launched in February 2015 is currently on a trajectory to collide with the moon in just a few weeks. The rocket left from Florida’s Cape Canaveral and launched NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, a project that Read more…
Elderly people living near or downwind from unconventional oil and gas wells such as fracking sites are more likely to die prematurely, according to a major new US study. Extracting oil and gas through newer or unconventional methods like fracking has expanded rapidly across America over the past two decades Read more…
While mapping radio waves across the universe, astronomers happened upon a celestial object releasing giant bursts of energy — and it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. The spinning space object, spotted in March 2018, beamed out radiation three times per hour. In those moments, it became the brightest source Read more…
Sweden’s government gave the go-ahead on Thursday for the building of a storage facility to keep the country’s spent nuclear fuel safe for the next 100,000 years. What to do with nuclear waste has been a major headache since the world’s first nuclear plants came on line in the 1950s Read more…
When Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai, a mostly submerged volcanic cauldron in the South Pacific Ocean, exploded on January 15, it unleashed a blast perhaps as powerful as the world’s biggest nuclear bomb, and drove tsunami waves that crashed into Pacific shorelines. But 3 hours or so before their arrival in Japan, Read more…
NASA has confirmed that the James Webb Space Telescope has successfully entered its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point after one last course correction burn. The telescope’s primary mirror segments and secondary mirror have already been deployed, but you’ll have to wait until the summer for the first Read more…