After an eight-year analysis, an international team of scientists has announced a breakthrough in the understanding of how algae and iron interact to sequester atmospheric carbon. By adding iron to the ocean, the researchers induced a massive algal bloom. A significant portion died and sank to the ocean floor, carrying its sequestered carbon along with…
Thirty-three light-years away, in the constellation Leo the lion, astronomers say they have found a world considerably smaller than Earth, orbiting a dim red-dwarf star. That’s something to think about. While scientists have confirmed the existence of more than 700 so-called exoplanets since 1995, most of them have been giant — many considerably larger than…
Scientists have finally cracked a decades-old spaceflight riddle, figuring out why NASA’s Pioneer 10 and 11 probes began to slow mysteriously as they sped far from the sun. The cause of the so-called “Pioneer Anomaly,” it turns out, is heat coming from the electrical current flowing through the probes’ instrument and power systems. This heat…
The word “house” generally conjures images of rectangular dwellings with front porches and chimneys. Front lawns and garages too. But fast forward a few hundred years and the traditional four walls and a roof won’t be standard housing fare, according to urban experts. Climate change, population growth and geo-political shifts are already redefining the way…
Dolphins may use complex nonlinear mathematics when hunting, according to a new study that suggests these brainy marine mammals could be far more skilled at math than was ever thought possible before. Inspiration for the new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society A, came after lead author Tim Leighton watched an…
Astronomers have made a crucial step towards a scientific goal by observing the heart of a distant quasar with angular resolution. An international team of astronomers connected radio telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and Arizona for the first time using the technique of Very Long Baseline Interferometry, enabling them to make the sharpest observation ever of…
The popping of champagne corks may have subsided since scientists presented convincing evidence for the existence of the long-sought Higgs boson, but the work has just begun for theoretical particle physicists, who are revelling in the biggest glut of data they’ve had since the 1990s. Many are working evenings and weekends to interpret the results,…
With large swaths of oceans, rivers that snake for hundreds of miles, and behemoth glaciers near the north and south poles, Earth doesn’t seem to have a water shortage. And yet, less than 1% of our planet’s mass is locked up in water, and even that may have been delivered by comets and asteroids after…
Laser physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have broken the record for the highest-power laser shot with a collection of beams delivering more than 500 trillion watts of peak power. The National Ignition Facility fired 192 beams at the same time, delivering 1.85 megajoules of ultraviolet laser light to a target a mere two…
An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan tore off one of Greenland’s largest glaciers. For several years, scientists had been watching a long crack in the floating ice shelf of the northerly Petermann Glacier. Now, NASA satellites show it has broken completely, forming an iceberg covering 46 square miles. The same glacier spawned an iceberg…