Concentrations of ozone-damaging aluminum oxide in Earth’s atmosphere could rise by 650% in the coming years due to an increase in the number of unused satellites burning up during re-entry, according to a first-of-its-kind study. As mega satellite satellites continue to attract interest from private companies, this could be pretty bad news for our planet’s… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and more. A lone diver first spotted the ancient Kyrenia shipwreck off the northern coast of Cyprus nearly 60 years ago. But when archaeologists tried to pinpoint the exact time the ship came to rest on the… Read More »
St. in the US Virgin Islands. A sea cucumber on the sandy ocean bottom off St. Croix. NOAA, CC BY-ND My Georgia Tech colleague Mark Hay recently published a study showing that removing sea cucumbers from reef communities led to an increase in organic waste material and a 15-fold increase in coral mortality. Protecting sea… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and more. For thousands of years, one color rose above the others and was worth its weight in gold, according to a fourth-century imperial edict. Tyrian purple was a highly valued pigment developed in the Bronze Age… Read More »
SACATON, Ariz. (AP) — Stephen Roe Lewis grew up seeing piles of legal briefs at the dinner table, mostly about his tribe’s water. His father, the late Rodney Lewis, was chief counsel for the Gila River Indian Community and fought for the tribe’s water rights in the Southwest, eventually securing the largest Native American water… Read More »
What do you do when your star attraction — a retired space shuttle — remains hidden and out of public view for the next few years? If you’re the California Science Center, you land another spacecraft. The Los Angeles museum and educational center announced the addition of a SpaceX Dragon capsule to its collection on… Read More »
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — A next-generation weather satellite has left its home planet behind. Following concerns that weather conditions would not be suitable, an excellent window of opportunity opened today (June 25) for the launch of GOES-U, the fourth and final member of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). GOES-R series Earth observation… Read More »
Using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), astronomers have discovered clusters of stars in the “Cosmic Stones” arc that existed only 460 million years after the Big Bang. This marks the first discovery of star clusters in a newborn galaxy, seen when the 13.8 billion-year-old universe was less than 500 million years old. Originally discovered… Read More »
The interiors of rocky planets and moons tend to be quite hot compared to their surfaces. This heat, which can arise from a number of sources including tidal stretching and compression, the initial accretion of the planet, and radioactive decay of heavy elements, can drive large convection currents of rocky material within these bodies. The… Read More »
Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news about fascinating discoveries, scientific breakthroughs and more. Forecasters will soon be able to see a real-time map of lightning activity on Earth and keep a closer eye on solar storms unleashed by the sun, thanks to a new weather satellite. NASA and… Read More »