In the film Planet of the Humans, producer and director Jeff Gibbs and executive producer Michael Moore take aim at renewable energy technologies and the environmental organizations such as 350.org and the Sierra Club that promote them. The film’s premise is that green tech is not so green and that turning to this technology as […] More
Human beings have a superpower — sweating. When temperatures rise, beads of sweat exude from our pores and evaporate, releasing energy that cools the skin and keeps our bodies from overheating. This self-cooling mechanism has helped humans spread to every hot and humid corner of the globe. But that sweating superpower has a theoretical upper […] More
Microbe communities living in the seafloor off Peru haven’t bounced back from a deep-sea mining experiment 26 years ago. The populations are still reduced by 30 percent in this part of the South Pacific Ocean, researchers report April 29 in Science Advances. From 1989 to 1996, the DISturbance and reCOLonization, or DISCOL, experiment plowed grooves […] More
Superconductivity under pressure, Science News, May 2, 1970 – Cooling certain metals to temperatures near absolute zero turns them into superconductors, substances without electrical resistance, in which currents flow without power loss. In recent years it has become apparent that in some cases pressure as well as cooling has something to do with inducing superconductivity. Metals are […] More
Superconductors are getting edgy. For the first time, scientists have spotted a superconducting current traveling along the edge of a material, like a trail of ants crawling along the rim of a dinner plate without venturing into its middle. Normally, such superconducting currents, in which electricity flows without any loss of energy, permeate an entire […] More
In the tug-of-war between coastal melting and inland ice buildup, the meltdown is winning in both Greenland and Antarctica. Initial observations from NASA’s ICESat-2 satellite in 2018 and 2019 reveal how the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have changed since the original ICESat mission collected data from 2003 to 2008. Both missions measured the height […] More
When it rains heavily in Hawaii, lava pours from the volcano Kilauea, according to a new study facing strong scrutiny by some volcanologists. Starting in May 2018, the volcano dramatically ramped up its 35-year-long eruption, opening 24 new fissures and shooting fountains of lava 80 meters into the air. Within three months, the volcano had […] More
Satellite data show that more than twice as much methane is leaking from a vast U.S. oil- and natural gas-producing region than previously estimated. From May 2018 to March 2019, a European Space Agency satellite measured an average of 2.7 teragrams of methane emitted each year from the Permian Basin, which spans more than 160,000 […] More
