heavier

A pedestrian navigates a driving rain from Hurricane Ian on September 30, 2022 in Charleston, South Carolina.Photo: Scott Olson (Getty Images)It’s raining harder across most of the U.S. and climate change is to blame, new research has found.A new paper published in Geophysical Research Letters has found that the country is seeing heavier rainfall as the climate changes. Researchers at Northwestern University connected their findings to the fact that as the planet becomes warmer, air begins to hold more moisture, the…

Protons may have more "charm" than we thought, new research suggests.A proton is one of the subatomic particles that make up the nucleus of an atom. As small as protons are, they are composed of even tinier elementary particles known as quarks, which come in a variety of "flavors," or types: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top.Typically, a proton is thought to be made of two up quarks and one down quark. But a new study finds it's more complicated than that.Protons can also contain a charm quark, an elementary…

Wing, the drone delivery company operated by Google parent Alphabet, unveiled a series of new prototype aircraft designed to handle a variety of payloads. The company said the new drones will share the same underlying components with the aircraft currently in use delivering pharmaceuticals and other small packages in the suburbs outside of Dallas-Fort Worth. According to Wing CEO Adam Woodworth, the aim is to right-size the delivery industry in order to match the appropriate package with a similar sized vehicle. “Just…

How many of what kinds of stars live in other galaxies? It seems like a simple question, but it's notoriously hard to pin down because astronomers have such a difficult time estimating stellar populations in remote galaxies.  Now a team of astronomers has completed a census of over 140,000 galaxies and found that distant galaxies tend to have heavier stars.Stellar censusEven though astronomers lack a complete census of all the hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, they've sampled enough of them to get a…

A top-of-the-line farm tractor stands taller than an African elephant. And fully loaded with grain, a combine harvester weighs up to 36 tons—as much as a small herd of pachyderms. As these mechanical beasts lumber across fields, their extreme heft can slowly crush the soil and make it harder for plant roots to grow. Such effects, a new study suggests, could diminish harvests across 20% of global cropland in the coming decades. “Heavy machinery is something we should not ignore,”…

What's in a star? Well, if you're a highly evolved specimen nearing the end of its life named HD 222925, rather a heck of a lot, actually.Scientists have conducted an analysis of this dim object, and identified 65 separate elements. That's the most elements ever found in a single object outside the Solar System, and most of them are heavy elements from the bottom of the periodic table, rarely found in stars.  Since these elements can only form in extremely energetic events such as supernovae or neutron star mergers, via…