Science

For centuries, sailors have known where the most fearsome storms are located: the Southern Hemisphere. “The waves ran mountain-high and threatened to overwhelm [the ship] at every roll,” wrote one passenger on an 1849 voyage rounding the tip of South America. Decades later, scientists poring over satellite data could finally put numbers behind that experience. … Read more

Astronomers have discovered the closest black hole to Earth, the first unambiguous detection of a dormant stellar-mass black hole in the Milky Way. Its close proximity to Earth, a mere 1,600 light-years away, offers an intriguing target of study to advance understanding of the evolution of binary systems. The U.S. National Science Foundation provided funding … Read more

A new study by researchers at New York University and other institutions details ways that flooding can affect food security. The study tracked the effects of flooding on 5.6 million people in several African nations. “Our findings show that floods can impact food security both immediately and in the months after the flood event,” says … Read more

Proper indoor ventilation is key to reducing the spread of COVID-19. Now, a study by MIT researchers finds that indoor relative humidity may also influence transmission of the virus. Relative humidity is the amount of moisture in the air compared to the total moisture the air can hold at a given temperature before saturating and … Read more

There are many sources of ice-forming particles in the atmosphere, but sea spray aerosols, or SSAs, are a significant source of ice-nucleating particles, or INPs. What SSAs are composed of, how they affect cloud formation, and how they may affect climate remain outstanding questions for atmospheric scientists. Now researchers at Stony Brook University have developed … Read more

The Earth’s climate has undergone big changes, from global volcanism to planet-cooling ice ages and dramatic shifts in solar radiation. And yet life, for the last 3.7 billion years, has kept on beating. Now, a U.S. National Science Foundation-supported study by MIT researchers in Science Advances confirms that the planet harbors a “stabilizing feedback” mechanism that acts … Read more

The phrase “to swallow one’s tongue” has been around since at least the 1880s and has been repurposed in several languages to mean everything from falling silent to a general feeling of fear. While it’s anatomically impossible for a human to swallow their tongue, a new study shows that cane toads (Rhinella marina) achieve this … Read more

Stumbling upon a new source of underwater caffeine was just an added bonus of a new study examining the impact of chemical compounds that corals release into the seawater. The study found that the organic chemical compounds produced through metabolism — known as metabolites or exudates — vary significantly by coral species, and that the … Read more

Melting ice sheets may cause sea level rise in the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS; 20% of UN member states) that is 11% higher than the global average. Because the Paris Agreement targets focus solely on global mean temperatures, rather than including effects such as sea level rise (SLR), outsize negative impacts of climate … Read more

Microplastics have become a new form of plastic pollution, reaching an alarming level worldwide. Commodity plastics are widely considered to be chemically inert, but alterations in their surface properties owing to environmental weathering are often overlooked, impeding their life-cycle analysis in the environment.  In a new paper published in ACS Environmental Au, researchers at Louisiana State University detail … Read more