Burning Man’s Climate Reckoning Has Begun
Burning Man, the transient bacchanal that attracts more than 70,000 partygoers to the remote Nevada desert for eight days every August, prides itself on its environmental bona fides. One of…
MOXIE, NASA’s Oxygen-Producing Experiment on Mars, Ends Operations
On April 20, 2021, the spiritedly-named MOXIE experiment on Mars extracted 5 grams of oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, demonstrating a potential future capability of an established human presence on…
Satellite Photos Reveal Extent of Floods at This Year’s Burning Man
Tens of thousands of Burning Man attendees in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert had to trudge through rain and mud last Friday and into last weekend after an unusual bout of…
Will Mining the Moon and Asteroids Be Worth the Trouble?
The new era of space exploration is opening entirely new possibilities, including the tantalizing prospect of mining for resources on the Moon and asteroids. Sounds exciting—and potentially very profitable—but the…
Temperature-Related Deaths in the US Could Jump Fivefold by 2100, Study Finds
Hot weather is poised to kill many more Americans every year if current trends hold, recent research suggests. It estimates that the U.S. could see 200,000 temperature-related deaths annually by…
Hurricane Lee Intensifies Into a Category 5 Storm, Unclear If It Will Make Landfall in the US
Lee has intensified into a dangerous Category 5 hurricane in the Caribbean, the first storm to reach that strength in this year’s hurricane season. Hurricane Ian Recovery | Extreme Earth…
Clever Camera Trick Unlocks Hidden Secrets of Sun’s Atmosphere
Scientists behind a Sun-observing probe applied a simple hack to one of its cameras, allowing them to peer into rarely seen regions of the Sun’s atmosphere. The GoPro Hero 12…
Enhanced Space Access Means Remarkable New Science Is on the Horizon
Rocket launches are expensive and laborious, but for decades they’ve been the price of doing business for space agencies hoping to get their latest satellite, telescope, or team of astronauts…
Scientists Stumped by ‘Golden Orb’ From Seafloor That’s ‘Biological in Origin’
The specimen as seen in the NOAA vessel’s wet lab.Photo: NOAA Ocean Exploration, Seascape Alaska A team of researchers exploring the seafloor off Alaska last week recovered a peculiar brassy-yellow…
Wind Satellite’s Final Moments Captured Before Intentional Destruction
In late July, the Aeolus Earth Explorer satellite plunged through Earth’s atmosphere to burn up as scraps. Its unprecedented controlled reentry was captured through a series of images that show…