News
Scientists want to monitor every river on Earth from space
5+ day, 9+ hour ago (808+ words) Most people rarely think about rivers unless one is flooding or running dry. But rivers connect everything " oceans, atmosphere, landscapes, and the cities that billions of people depend on for their water." The problem is that many of the world's…...
NASA satellite can now track fall colors leaf by leaf from space
6+ day, 1+ hour ago (822+ words) Every autumn, millions of people try to time nature's biggest show. Travelers plan leaf-peeping trips, tourism boards issue peak-color forecasts, and park managers watch the hillsides for the first signs of red and gold. Yet almost all of those predictions…...
Giant planet discovered where a day lasts longer than a year
4+ day, 1+ hour ago (898+ words) Astronomers have spent years studying giant planets known as hot Jupiters because they offer a rare chance to watch extreme worlds up close. These massive gas giants orbit so close to their stars that a year can last only a…...
Gravastars: Not all dying stars end up as black holes
1+ week, 5+ hour ago (843+ words) A giant star has one famous fate. Its core gives out, gravity takes over, and everything vanishes into a black hole. Now two physicists have shown how gravastars form instead. That black hole ending has never sat easily with theorists,…...
Venus flytrap snaps shut using a mechanism nobody expected
1+ week, 8+ hour ago (857+ words) Drop a fly onto a Venus flytrap and the leaf swings shut faster than almost anything else in the plant world. It looks like settled science, the kind of thing biology classes nailed down decades ago. Textbooks offered an explanation…...
Scientists confirm the universe is still expanding faster and faster
1+ week, 1+ day ago (868+ words) The accelerating universe is one of those facts you half-remember from science class. Galaxies are flying apart, with the gaps between them stretching wider and faster as the years pass, pushed by something nobody can see. Then a group of…...
Scientists solve a 100-year-old mystery hidden in every color you see
1+ week, 1+ day ago (830+ words) They feel like tidy human inventions, controls someone designed for our pictures. A team of scientists now argues those three qualities were never ours to invent. They live inside the mathematics of color itself, and digging them out meant finishing…...
Strange 'little red dots' may be growing supermassive black holes
1+ week, 1+ day ago (789+ words) Little red dots have puzzled astronomers ever since NASA's James Webb Space Telescope discovered them in 2022. These small, unusually bright objects appeared in the early universe and quickly became one of astronomy's biggest mysteries. They are surprisingly common despite their…...
Astronomers hope this tiny X-ray telescope will tell them what the Moon is really made of
1+ week, 2+ day ago (875+ words) The rocks Apollo astronauts carried home have anchored what we know about the Moon's makeup. They came from a handful of landing spots, every one of them near the lunar equator. What the rest of the surface is made of,…...
Moon meteorite reveals three ancient impacts in a single rock
1+ week, 2+ day ago (854+ words) Find a meteorite in the desert and the odds say it came from an asteroid drifting between Mars and Jupiter. Collectors comb the dunes of northwest Africa for these dark, sun-baked stones. But one of the meteorites came from somewhere…...