Australia’s Great Barrier Reef is currently experiencing its third mass bleaching in just five years — and it is the most widespread bleaching event ever recorded. Results from aerial surveys conducted along the 2,000-kilometer-long reef over nine days in late March, and released April 7, show that 25 percent of 1,036 individuals reefs surveyed were […] More
When giant stars eat giant planets, their starlight may shine a bit less brightly. That dimming could affect how astronomers measure distances across the universe — and possibly even put past measurements in doubt. “You would think the planet would be a small perturbation to the star,” says astrophysicist Licia Verde. “It turns out that […] More
Even if you could measure three black holes’ locations as precisely as physically possible, you still might not know where the black holes would go. Such a trio’s complex dance can be so chaotic that the motions are fundamentally unpredictable, new computer simulations show. The paths of three black holes orbiting each other can be […] More
Once upon a time, there was a swampy rainforest near the bottom of the world. Buried sediment extracted from the seafloor off West Antarctica contains ancient pollen, fossilized roots and other chemical evidence of a diverse forest that flourished millions of years ago, less than a thousand kilometers from the South Pole. The sediment offers […] More
Physicists have finally captured a superconductor’s wave. The first direct evidence of a phase of matter known as a pair-density wave helps reveal the physics that underlies mysterious high-temperature superconductors, which conduct electricity without resistance at surprisingly high temperatures. The wave was detected using a scanning tunneling microscope, researchers report April 1 in Nature. Physicists […] More
“Waiter, there’s a worm in my sushi.” Diners may be more likely to utter those words today than in decades past, as the abundance of parasitic Anisakis worms infecting fishes around the globe is now 283 times what it was in the 1970s, researchers report March 19 in Global Change Biology. Worms of the genus […] More
Hilde Fålun Strøm and Sunniva Sorby are taking citizen science to the extreme. In August, the two women moved into a tiny hunting cabin on the high-Arctic Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard. The hut, dubbed Bamsebu, is the only shelter for 140 kilometers. Polar bears prowl the area. It’s not unusual for the winter chill to […] More
If you’ve ever had the misfortune of stepping on a Lego, you know the plastic building blocks have absolutely no give. Now, scientists have discovered another unpleasant consequence of the toys’ indestructibility: A single Lego could take hundreds of years to break down in the ocean. Earth’s oceans are littered with plastic of all kinds […] More
