Sixty million years ago, when the Eurasian plate slammed into the Indian plate, a mountain range was born. Because these plates were of similar density, neither could sink below the other. The rocks had nowhere to go but up. Now, the Himalayas host Earth’s tallest mountains. Mount Everest is the tallest, towering 5.4 miles (8.8 … Read more
For the past three days, from Monday through Wednesday (July 3-5), global temperatures have either broken or matched records for the hottest day on Earth since at least 1979, according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a tool that compiles data and models to measure the global atmosphere. Monday’s average worldwide temperature climbed to … Read more
After 65 years of lunar exploration, the United States is finally going to put its first autonomous rover on the moon. But this mission won’t be helmed by NASA engineers — instead, it is the brainchild of a dedicated group of college students. The Iris rover was developed by students, faculty and alumni at Carnegie Mellon … Read more
The guy who bought Twitter wants to have a city of a million people on Mars by 2050. That may sound astronomically ambitious considering humans have never set foot on the Martian surface. But is it feasible? How long would it take for humans to colonize another planet? And could it ever be possible for … Read more
Neptune is famously a vivid blue, but the asteroids orbiting near it are decidedly not. An international team of astronomers recently took a peek at Neptune’s Trojan asteroids and found that they all seem to be some shade of red — far redder than most asteroids in the solar system. They published their results Feb. … Read more
Five years ago, NASA’s infrared Spitzer Space Telescope helped discover a family of seven rocky exoplanets orbiting the same star, known as TRAPPIST-1. Now, NASA’s new infrared powerhouse — the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) — measured the temperature of one of those worlds, TRAPPIST-1b, in new research published in the journal Nature. The bad … Read more
Scientists have long debated the greatest possible age of a person, with previous studies placing the limit at up to 150 years. But in the past 25 years, no one has surpassed the record for the world’s oldest person, held by Jean Louise Calment, who died at age 122 in 1997. “This has led people … Read more
Astronomers have discovered one of the largest black holes ever found — an ultramassive monster roughly 30 billion times the mass of the sun — using a space-time trick predicted by Albert Einstein. The colossal black hole, which lurks 2.7 billion light-years from Earth in the brightest galaxy of the galaxy cluster Abell 1201, was … Read more
Chinese researchers may have discovered billions of tons of water inside strange glass spheres buried on the moon, and they could be used as a future water source for moon bases, a new study suggests. The tiny glass spherules, collected in lunar soil samples and brought to Earth by China’s Chang’e-5 mission in December 2020, … Read more
A person’s native language may shape how their brain builds connections between different hubs of information processing, a new brain scan study reveals. The observed differences in these language network structures were related to linguistic characteristics in the native languages of the study participants: German and Arabic. “So the difference we find there shouldn’t be … Read more
