Department of Energy’s attempts to prop up coal can look pretty pointless. In the US, the economics of coal power generation are marginal at best, and a large number of coal plants have shut down as cheaper renewables and natural gas have surged. The Trump administration has used a…
Our view of Neanderthal life keeps getting more complex and vibrant. Neanderthals may have used birch tar as more than just glue; it could have helped them ward off infection and even insect bites. People from several modern Indigenous cultures, including the Mi’kmaq of eastern Canada, use tar from…
Suit: The National Center for Atmospheric Research is to be terminated for no rational reason. On Monday, a consortium that oversees the US’s premier atmospheric research center announced it was suing the Trump administration over plans to shut it down. The National Center for Atmospheric Research, or NCAR, provides…
Meteor’s fiery passage through the atmosphere was captured by a space-based lightning mapper. A large meteor crashed through the sound barrier above northern Ohio on Tuesday morning, producing a large fireball and what local residents described as an extremely loud “boom.” According to various eyewitness reports, the meteor’s bright…
State attorneys general won’t get climate chapter removed from a legal manual. Judges are frequently confronted with cases that hinge upon scientific information that their educational backgrounds may leave them ill-equipped to manage. Because of this challenge, the Federal Judicial Center, a group within the judicial branch of the…
Engineers have uncovered the mathematical rules fireflies follow to sync up their flashes. Scientists have discovered that male fireflies in a South Carolina swamp follow local interaction rules to synchronize their flashing mating displays. The research is being presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Denver.…
When winning depends on intuiting a mathematical function, AIs come up short. With its Alpha series of game-playing AIs, Google’s DeepMind group seemed to have found a way for its AIs to tackle any game, mastering games like chess and Go by repeatedly playing itself during training. But then…
Frame-dragging may explain an odd pattern seen in the brightest supernovae. Some of the most extreme explosions in the universe are Type I superluminous supernovae. “They are one of the brightest explosions in the Universe,” says Joseph Farah, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. For years,…
The Inca Empire’s system of roads were built on centuries-old trade routes. Centuries before the rise of the Inca Empire, a much smaller kingdom on the central coast of Peru already had a sophisticated trade network—one it used to import live parrots across the Andes from the Amazon rainforest.…
The US eliminated measles in 2000, but the disease is once again circulating. In the three decades between 1993 and 2024, measles in the US was relatively rare—a few hundred cases each year, at most. But suddenly, the disease has become so entrenched in American life that it sometimes…
