ScIence

Physicist Proposes Radical New ‘Stellar Engine’ That Could Move Our Entire Solar System

As far as hypothetical space megastructures go, the stellar engine is one of our favourites – a gigantic contraption built with the purpose of transporting our Solar System somewhere else, if we ever need to move to a different cosmic neighbourhood. Now, new research has put forward another idea for what such a radical stellar engine might look like. Via this beautiful video from Kurzgesag

Satellite Photos Prove The Arctic Ice Cap Is Drastically Shrinking

Climate change, global warming, El Niño, or whatever else people have heard it called in the last two decades has been a massively divisive discussion. Some believe that the entire thing was simply a hoax made up by China in order to somehow make U.S. manufacturing less competitive. Meanwhile, almost the entire scientific community of the world has shown time and time again that climate change

NASA Releases Time-Lapse Of the Disappearing Arctic Polar Ice Cap

NASA posted this video to YouTube with this description: “Arctic sea ice has not only been shrinking in surface area in recent years, it’s becoming younger and thinner as well. In this animation, where the ice cover almost looks gelatinous as it pulses through the seasons, cryospheric scientist Dr. Walt Meier of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center describes how the sea ice has undergone fund

Thickest sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has lost 95% of its mass in 35 years

The oldest and thickest Arctic sea ice – dubbed the last Arctic ice refuge – is now thought to be disappearing twice as fast as ice in the rest of the Arctic Ocean. A new time-lapse video (below), created by the American Geophysical Union, shows the age of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland since 1984, shortly after reliable satellite observations began. As you can clearl

NASA Scientists Detect Huge Thermonuclear Blast Deep in Space

NASA recently detected a massive thermonuclear explosion coming from outer space. The culprit seems to be a distant pulsar, the space agency reports, which is the stellar remains of a star that blew up in a supernova but was too small to form a black hole. NASA spotted the burst because it sent out an intense beam of x-rays that got picked up by the agency's orbital observatory NICER. All in

Incredible 4D Microscope Images Make Molecular Structures Look Like Psychedelic Art

Electron microscopes are great at producing high-resolution images of a material's atomic structure - if the material is hard, that is. Unfortunately, the devices' electron beams can destroy softer materials, so scientists typically rely on X-rays, which can't reach atomic resolution, to image those. But scientists at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have publ

NASA Images Show Just How Much Carbon Monoxide Is Coming Off The Burning Amazon

A NASA satellite captured harrowing images of carbon monoxide in the atmosphere due to the wildfires that continue to rage in the Amazon rainforest. NASA collected new data from their Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) instrument, measuring levels of carbon monoxide at an altitude of 18,000 feet (5,500 meters) from August 8 to 22, according to a press release. The AIRS, which is aboard NA

Independent Data Just Confirmed July as Earth’s Hottest Month Since Records Began

Data from thousands of surface monitoring stations worldwide, including ocean buoys in the Pacific and land-based thermometers dotting the continents, show that July 2019 was the warmest month on Earth since at least 1850. Berkeley Earth, an independent climate monitoring and research organization, released data Thursday showing last month beat August 2016 for the title of the warmest month b

Mission Success Declared as Solar Sail Propels Itself From Earth Using Only Sunbeams

Back in 1976, the late Carl Sagan sat down on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson to talk about a new form of space propulsion called solar sailing. Four decades later, and The Planetary Society has officially demonstrated this "tremendously exciting prospect" in practice. Drawing on ten years of hard work and 7 million dollars in crowdfunding, the nonprofit Society's LightSail 2 has become t

Scientists Get the Green Light to Create Human-Animal Hybrids in Japan

Human-animal hybrids are set to be developed at the University of Tokyo after the Japanese government recently lifted a ban on the controversial stem-cell research. Hiromitsu Nakauchi—director for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at the University of Tokyo and team leader at Stanford’s Nakauchi Lab—is the first to receive approval for the questionable experiments which will att