Aug 31, 2023 | Salon.com
Neutrinos are some of the most enigmatic particles in all of physics. Sporting a neutral charge and a mass close to zero, neutrinos rarely interact with other matter and as such have been notoriously difficult to observe. Scientists have still learned a great deal about them — including identifying three neutrino types (electron, muon and tau particles) — but observing them has been quite another matter....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 30, 2023 | Salon.com
Earlier this week Idalia was merely a tropical storm, but unnaturally warmed water near America’s southeastern coast helped rear it into a record-breaking hurricane flooding Florida and Georgia. Experts agree that excessive heat from climate change, primarily caused by burning ossil fuels, contributed to this result, apparently super-charging the tropical storm....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 30, 2023 | Salon.com
By the end of the century, nearly 1 billion mostly poor people could die due to climate change, a new study suggests. If climate change reaches 2°C higher than pre-industrial levels, the level of death it will unleash would be catastrophic, according to research published in the scientific journal Energies....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 28, 2023 | Salon.com
Experts have predicted for years that as climate change worsens, extreme weather events will become both more intense and more frequent. Among other things, scientists observe that tropical storms will more often turn into hurricanes as they hit warmer waters while heading to the shore. That very thing appears to now be happening with Tropical Storm Idalia....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 28, 2023 | Salon.com
An encounter with a puppy or a baby, it doesn’t matter, can often draw out the same behavior, almost involuntarily. You know the one: A high pitched cooing, an exaggerated drawl, a tone beaming with unconditional love. Scientists call this “exaggerated prosody.” To ordinary people, we know it as “the cute-sie voice.”...
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 28, 2023 | Salon.com
When climatologist Dr. Twila Moon described a future of climate change-caused horrors as “baked in,” she may not have intended to create a darkly apt pun for global warming. Certainly the future she laid out for sea level rise, a term for an increase in the level of the world’s oceans, is a very grim one....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 25, 2023 | Salon.com
The ice-giant Neptune, the most distant and third largest planet in our solar system, is a distinctive dark blue ball of gas, which may appear calm but is actually throttled by a chaotic atmosphere. It’s actually the windiest place in our solar system. Despite earning the label “ice-giant” in part because of its massive size (and also because it is primarily composed of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium), Neptune is far enough away from Earth that our astronomers continue making new discoveries of this enigmatic world....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 24, 2023 | Salon.com
When speaking with Salon in 2021, twenty-six-year-old climate activist Kidus Girma expressed anxiety about the future of the planet — but, at the same time, some hope that he might be able to play a tiny part in making things better.
“I’m thinking about what we need as human beings, and what my small role in that is, and what the big role is for all of us,” Girma told Salon at the time....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 23, 2023 | Salon.com
On Wednesday India joined the United States, Russia and China as one of the only nations on Earth to navigate its technology onto the surface of the Moon. Perhaps even more impressive, the Indian mission known as Chandrayaan-3 managed to land its rover in the southern polar region, the first country to do so without crashing....
Originally posted on salon.com
Aug 23, 2023 | Salon.com
If you’ve never had to flee a wildfire, the idea can seem like something out of a disaster film. But as the climate gets warmer, thanks to humans burning fossil fuels, wildfires are becoming larger and more common. Earlier this summer, millions of people in North America awoke to orange skies and blankets of smog from Canadian wildfire smoke that was drifting thousands of miles away....
Originally posted on salon.com