planet

A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6595.Download PDF These are strange times for the Indigenous Nenets reindeer herders of northern Siberia. In their lands on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, bare tundra is thawing, bushes are sprouting, and willows that a generation ago struggled to reach knee height now grow 3 meters tall, hiding the reindeer. Surveys show the Nenets autonomous district, an area the size of Florida, now has four…

The world is now 1.1 degrees Celsius — 2 degrees Fahrenheit — warmer on average than it was at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But baked into that seemingly small change in the average is a big increase in dangerous extreme temperatures. That’s made cooling, particularly air conditioning, vital for the survival of billions of people. The devastation of extreme temperatures is playing out right now in several places around the world. A gargantuan heat wave over India and Pakistan, where 1.5 billion people live,…

Astro Slide 5G: A 6.39-inch AMOLED slides back to reveal a QWERTY keyboard. The device runs on MediaTek's Dimensity 800 chipset with 8GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage (expandable via MicroSD card). Images: Sandra Vogel / ZDNet The Psion Series 5 is one of the icons of handheld computing. Indeed, for some people it is the icon.…

3d rendering of the meteorite investigated by researchers. Neutron and X-ray tomography showed that the meteorite had limited exposure to water. Credit: Josefin MartellA research team led by Lund University in Sweden has investigated a meteorite from <span class="glossaryLink" aria-describedby="tt" data-cmtooltip="<div class=glossaryItemTitle>Mars</div><div class=glossaryItemBody>Mars is the second smallest planet in our solar system and the fourth planet from the sun. Iron…

If the UK switched to a plant-based diet – and used regenerative farming to produce food on the arable land we have (not using artificial fertilisers or pesticides) – how much could we be self-sufficient in food, percentage-wise? dad_climateThe calculations that partly address it have been done by the author and small-scale dairy farmer Simon Fairlie, updating the earlier work of the ecologist Kenneth Mellanby.We currently use 17.5m hectares of farmland in the UK. Fairlie finds that while a diet containing a moderate…

We've been talking about aliens on Mars for decades. If the Red Planet has got something to show, Earth's rovers will surely find a hint of it — this has been our belief for years. It seems like NASA's Curiosity rover is already finding some sneaky details on the planet. Curiosity keeps sending images from Mars to scientists on Earth. The current shots it has sent our way show a rather curious detail in the rocky terrains of the planet. From the photos, it seems like Curiosity stumbled upon a perfectly carved door among…

One of the most recent snaps beamed back from the Curiosity rover on Mars has revealed a rather interesting feature in the rocks: what looks to be a perfectly carved out doorway nestling in the Martian landscape.  The doorway doppelgänger is so eerily convincing we're almost tempted to start believing that it leads to a little hideaway for Martians, or perhaps a portal to another Universe entirely. We're also getting 'tunnel to the center of the planet' vibes from this.At the very least, the picture and the geological…

A quake of magnitude 5 shook the surface of Mars on May 4, as per a seismometer placed by NASA's InSight lander on the planet. The seismic event has been dubbed a “monster” quake by the space agency given that it is the strongest temblor ever detected not just on Mars but also on any planet other than Earth. The red planet had previously recorded seismic events of magnitude 4.2 and magnitude 4.1 in August 2021. The space agency had found that these quakes were, in turn, five times stronger than the previous largest…

In terms of seismic events on the red planet (or indeed any other planet besides Earth), this is the biggest one recorded so far: the NASA InSight lander has recorded a 'monster' of a marsquake, which is estimated to have hit magnitude 5 on the scale used on Earth.  That beats the previous record holder, a magnitude-4.2 marsquake that Insight recorded back on 25 August 2021. The new quake happened on Mars on May 4 of this year, the 1,222nd sol (or Martian day) of the lander's mission.A magnitude-5 quake on Earth would be…

Thousands of wild bird species are growing ill or dying from habitat loss, climate change, and overexploitation, according to new research.A new estimate from researchers around the world has found 48 percent of living bird species are known or suspected to have declining populations.  That's more than 5,000 species that face a risky future. Among the species surveyed, only 6 percent showed increases in population."We are now witnessing the first signs of a new wave of extinctions of continentally distributed bird…