Dec 21, 2024 | Salon.com
Back when the stars in our universe were initially being formed, they created rotating disks of dust and gas known as protoplanetary disks. These protoplanetary disks slowly congealed into planets — so slowly, in fact, that astronomers speculated all of the protoplanetary disks that once existed have since blown away....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 19, 2024 | Salon.com
The year 2024 is on track to be the hottest in recorded history, as humanity has officially exceeded the 1.5º C threshold established by the 2015 Paris climate accord. Despite this milestone, President-elect Donald Trump is pushing environmental scientists out of the government. According to Dr. Mark Serreze and many other climate scientists who spoke with Salon, the new reality created in 2024 by unprecedented rising temperatures is the biggest news story today, despite relative lack of coverage....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 18, 2024 | Salon.com
A long trip to space is about to get even longer. NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were originally supposed to spend only about a week aboard the International Space Station, but due to issues with their spaceship, have remained stuck for months. Originally slated to return in February, the two astronauts are now going to remain onboard on the ISS until “no earlier” than late March 2025, according to a recent report....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 18, 2024 | Salon.com
There’s a lot of stuff in space that we know is there but we can’t see very well or at all. Some of this stuff is known as mysterious dark matter, others are things like dark comets, which as their name suggests, are far more difficult to see from Earth than something like Tsuchinshan-Atlas....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 17, 2024 | Salon.com
Researchers have long wished to understand the connection between sleep and memory, especially how the brain encodes long-term memories during slow-wave sleep (while discarding others), or the deep sleep that occurs during the initial hours of one’s rest. Recent research sheds fascinating new light on the issue, but to understand how this works, scientists had to literally take brain samples from living people....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 16, 2024 | Salon.com
Humans have yearned for immortality for as long as we‘ve understood our fragile permanence. But while dodging the Grim Reaper was once relegated to the realm of religious myth, now technology is attempting to find the cure for death. Most popular is the idea of cryopreservation — that is, any process which preserves biological tissues by storing them at extremely cold temperatures — which can be traced back to a 1931 science fiction novel, “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 13, 2024 | Salon.com
Aaron Siri, the lawyer for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — President-elect Donald Trump’s presumptive nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services — petitioned the federal government on Friday to revoke its approval of the polio vaccine.
Siri, a prominent conspiracy theorist like Kennedy, has already filed a petition to pause the distribution of 13 other vaccines, including those that protect against hepatitis B and COVID-19....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 12, 2024 | Salon.com
Americans spend more time on average living with diseases compared to people in other countries, according to a recent study from the American Medical Association. Published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the retrospective study found that Americans live with diseases on average for 12.4 years. The main diseases with which individuals live long-term in the United States are mental illness, substance use disorder and musculoskeletal conditions....
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 12, 2024 | Salon.com
On Nov. 14, Rep. James Comer (R-KY) — the Republican chair for the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability and a longtime climate science denier — sent a letter to the Democrats asking for information about government scientists accused of preventing “views that challenge the existing consensus” from coming out. Less than three weeks later, Comer claimed that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has employees who “hamstring the incoming Trump administration’s ability to implement their own executive agendas.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Dec 9, 2024 | Salon.com
A pair of satellites astronomers hope can create an artificial eclipse were launched from a site in India last week. Beginning in 2025, each satellite will cause a periodic eclipse that lasts for six hours, much longer than the few minutes caused by natural eclipses.
In addition to conducting this experimental maneuver, the so-called ESA’s Proba-3 mission will observe a slice of the Sun’s ethereal corona difficult to perceive from Earth....
Originally posted on salon.com