Science

Tropical Storm Debby threatens to bring historic rains over parts of the Southeast. The National Weather service expects southeast Georgia and eastern South Carolina will receive extreme downpours as the downgraded hurricane (but still potent storm) stalls over these regions. “Nothing good can come of a slower storm,” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientist...

Hurricane Debby is on track to make landfall in Florida early Monday morning. The storm which formed rapidly and raced up the Gulf of Mexico late last week, intensified to hurricane strength as it neared landfall in the Big Bend area of Florida, the National Hurricane Center confirmed. Tweet may have been deleted As of...

It doesn’t have the name recognition of Halley’s Comet, but this enormous snowball zipping through space has fascinated at least one astronomer night after summer night for its shape-shifting tail.  Dan Bartlett, an astrophotographer based in east-central California, caught Comet Olbers zigzagging across the night sky this week. But each time he looks up through...

Folks, have you thanked the moon lately? The large, cratered orb — weighing in at some 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 pounds — serves us greatly. Its potent gravity stabilizes Earth‘s wobble, so we don’t spin chaotically over time (like on Mars), an unpleasant reality that would ignite climate chaos. Yet beyond ensuring our planet is livable, creating tides,...

The livestream of Alaska’s fat bears is unfiltered. It can be brutal. On July 27, one of the largest and most dominant bears of Katmai National Park and Preserve’s Brooks River attacked a cub, to the dread of web onlookers. The cub looked seriously injured, appeared to slightly improve over a couple of days, but...

A space reconnaissance mission has returned unprecedented imagery of a metal hunk zooming around Earth. The discarded three-ton rocket, a robust piece of space junk some 36 feet (11 meters) long, is the type of problematic debris agencies seek to remove from our planet’s orbit. A future collision could spawn thousands more objects, posing threats...

In the 1800s, pioneering scientists foresaw how carbon in the air could warm Earth. By 1938, English engineer Guy Callendar had linked rising atmospheric carbon dioxide to global warming. Now in 2024 — with atmospheric CO2 at its highest levels in at least 800,000 years — NASA found July 22 was the hottest day observed...

Every August, the most entertaining spectacle in our solar system isn’t in theaters or on a streaming service, but above all our heads at night: the cosmic pyrotechnics display that is the Perseid meteor shower. This year’s entry in this long-running annual show coincides with the warmest nights and early mornings of the year in...

NASA has used a number of eyebrow-raising words to describe their new Martian find: “fascinating,” “intriguing,” “compelling,” and “mind-bending.” The space agency’s Perseverance rover recently drilled into a Mars rock, where the six-wheeled robot had detected organic molecules (aka the “building blocks of life” as we know it). The robot collected a sample, and inside...

Billions of birds are likely killed in the U.S. each year — but contrary to popular claims, wind turbines aren’t nearly a primary culprit. Former President Trump has continually used his prominent platform to claim that wind turbines — an economically sensible part of energy generation in the U.S. — are “killing our birds.” “The...