Jul 16, 2024 | Salon.com
As out-of-control heat cooks our planet, shattering temperature records for the last 13 consecutive months, it melts polar ice and raises sea levels. Most people are familiar with how this works, but we typically only think of the consequences of sea level rise as threatening to drown Miami, for example....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 16, 2024 | Salon.com
If life exists on alien worlds, scientists expect that the worlds in question would have certain basic properties. There would be carbon, an element essential to the creation of organic molecules. The world will include enough water for the life to flourish, and the environment will stay within an acceptable range of temperatures (-15º C to 115º C)....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 13, 2024 | Salon.com
During the first debate of the 2024 election cycle, President Biden infamously flubbed his words, trailed off mid-sentence, stared off into space and otherwise acted every bit like a mentally incompetent 81-year-old man. With Biden’s fellow Democrats determined to save democracy from an election-denying Republican — former President Trump — who was recently empowered by the Supreme Court to be a dictator, their experts are now turning to one place for information about the future: Polls
Yet can they be trusted?...
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 11, 2024 | Salon.com
Scientists have discovered thousands of exoplanets in other solar systems and some of them are especially weird compared to our stellar neighborhood. For example, HD 189733 b, a planet 65 light years from Earth in the constellation Vulpecula, is larger than Jupiter, the largest planet in Earth’s solar system. But it also rains molten glass at extremely hot temperatures, with the scorching shards flying sideways due to winds that reach speeds of up to 5,000 mph (8,046 kph)....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 11, 2024 | Salon.com
For the 13th consecutive month, Earth’s average monthly temperature has broken all previous records, continuing a streak that began in June 2023. Significantly, the European climate service Copernicus added that that the world has been 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial levels for more than a year, pushing the planet up against the threshold established by the 2015 Paris climate agreement....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 9, 2024 | Salon.com
Summer isn’t close to over yet, but heat-related deaths in Phoenix, Arizona have doubled from their rate over the same period last year, according to a new report by the Maricopa County medical examiner. As burning fossil fuels worsens climate change, the largest metropolises in the American Southwest are predicted to keep suffering from record-breaking heat waves....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 9, 2024 | Salon.com
When fitness experts try to assess a person’s health, they usually perform a series of standard measurements. First they measure a human’s height, then compare that with the circumference of their chest, waist, hips and/or thighs. The goal is to help each individual achieve a thickness that suggests the healthiest percentage of body fat — not so low as to be malnourished, nor so high as to put a person at risk of cardiovascular diseases....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 6, 2024 | Salon.com
In the classic 1937 sci-fi novel “Star Maker,” author Olaf Stapledon imagined a massive machine that could encompass an entire star, capturing its energy and harnessing it to provide near unlimited energy to space-faring civilizations. More than two decades later, Stapledon’s creative thought experiment became a legitimate scientific concept when physicist Freeman Dyson published a 1960 paper in the journal Science....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 4, 2024 | Salon.com
The Oasis Valley speckled dace is a distinctive fish, with an elongated body covered in black freckles over a gold or silver-hued surface. Unfortunately for this rare species of dace, they only reside in a single spot on the planet: The springs which feed Nevada’s Amargosa River. Now the Oasis Valley speckled dace is at risk of extinction by more than half a dozen gold mines in the same area, according to a new petition filed by the Center for Biological Diversity....
Originally posted on salon.com
Jul 4, 2024 | Salon.com
From more than 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers last April began repairing a space probe that is headed to the constellation of Ophiucus, though it won’t arrive for some 38,000 years. NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977 and it has already outlived expectations, but the space agency hopes to continue receiving data from the probe until at least 2030....
Originally posted on salon.com