New Crew for the Space Station Launches with 4 Astronauts From 4 Countries
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — Four astronauts from four countries rocketed toward the International Space Station on Saturday.
They should reach the orbiting lab in their SpaceX capsule Sunday, replacing four astronauts living up there since March.
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A NASA astronaut was joined on the predawn liftoff from Kennedy Space Center by fliers from Denmark, Japan and Russia. They clasped one another’s gloved hands upon reaching orbit.
It was the first U.S. launch where every spacecraft seat was occupied by a different country — until now, NASA had always inc...
Source: TIME: Science - August 26, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MARCIA DUNN / AP Tags: Uncategorized Space Source Type: news
Antarctic Ice Loss is Hurting the Survival of Emperor Penguin Chicks, Study Reveals
The loss of ice in one region of Antarctica last year likely resulted in none of the emperor penguin chicks surviving in four colonies, researchers reported Thursday.
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Emperor penguins hatch their eggs and raise their chicks on the ice that forms around the continent each Antarctic winter and melts in the summer months.
Researchers used satellite imagery to look at breeding colonies in a region near Antarctica’s Bellingshausen Sea. The images showed no ice was left there in December during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer, as had occurred in 2021.
Researcher...
Source: TIME: Science - August 24, 2023 Category: Science Authors: CHRISTINA LARSON / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change embargoed study healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
One Man ’ s Quest to Heal the Oceans —And Maybe Save the World
Enric Sala—marine ecologist, conservationist, and ocean advocate—is standing under a life-size replica of a Northern Atlantic Right Whale at the natural history museum in Washington, D.C., and the air outside is smudged with wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada. It’s not surprising that Sala wants to talk about the smoke, or about whales. Their poop, however, is an unexpected twist. According to Sala, whale excrement, or, more precisely, the lack of it, has a role to play in the choking miasma that has forced my interview with one of the world’s foremost ocean explorers indoors instead of out on...
Source: TIME: Science - August 24, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Aryn Baker Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate TIME 2030 Source Type: news
Japan Is Releasing Wastewater Into the Pacific: What to Know About Radioactivity and Seafood
Early afternoon local time on Thursday, after years of questions and criticisms directed at the plan, Japan has begun the controversial release into the Pacific Ocean of water previously used to cool the reactors at the defunct Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power plant after they were damaged in 2011 by a massive earthquake and tsunami.
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The 1.3 million metric tons of treated wastewater—enough to fill more than 500 Olympic-size swimming pools—are currently stored in more than 1,000 tanks at the site of the power plant, and it is expected to take up to four decades to ...
Source: TIME: Science - August 24, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Chad de Guzman Tags: Uncategorized Japan Source Type: news
How India Became the First Country to Reach the Moon ’s South Pole
And then there was one.
Since earlier this month, there had been something of a footrace in space, with India and Russia vying to be the first country to land a spacecraft in the moon’s south polar region.
On July 14, the Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-3, blasted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Center in southeastern India, carrying a 1,726 kg (3,805 lb) lander, which itself contains a little 26 kg (57 lb) rover. Then on Aug. 9, Russia followed in hot pursuit, launching its 1,750 kg (3,858 lb) Luna 25 lander from the newly built Vostochny Cosmodrome in the country’s far eastern Amur Oblast region.
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Source: TIME: Science - August 23, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Climate Change Made Eastern Canada ’ s Wildfires Twice as Likely
Climate change more than doubled the chances of the hot, dry weather that helped fuel the unprecedented wildfire season in eastern Canada that’s driven thousands from their homes and blanketed parts of the U.S. with choking smoke, according to an analysis released Tuesday.
What’s more, human-caused climate change made the fire season in Quebec — from May through July — 50% more intense than it otherwise would have been and increased the likelihood of similarly severe fire seasons at least sevenfold, researchers said.
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“The biggest takeaway is,...
Source: TIME: Science - August 23, 2023 Category: Science Authors: TAMMY WEBBER / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Fukushima Nuclear Plant To Release Treated Radioactive Water To Sea As Soon As Thursday
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(TOKYO) — The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant will start releasing treated and diluted radioactive wastewater into the Pacific Ocean as early as Thursday — a controversial step that the government says is essential for the decades of work needed to clean up the facility that had reactor meltdowns 12 years ago.
Prime Minister Fumio Kishida gave the final go-ahead Tuesday at a meeting of Cabinet ministers involved in the plan and instructed the operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, or TEPCO, to be ready to start the coastal release Thursday if w...
Source: TIME: Science - August 22, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MARI YAMAGUCHI / AP Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
What Caused Tropical Storm Hilary ’ s Record-Breaking Rainfall
A natural El Nino, human-caused climate change, a stubborn heat dome over the nation’s midsection and other factors cooked up Tropical Storm Hilary’s record-breaking slosh into California and Nevada, scientists figure.
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Cooked up is the key phrase, since hot water and hot air were crucial in rapidly growing Hilary and then steering the storm on an unusual path that dumped 10 months of rain in a single weekend in normally bone-dry places. Nearly a foot of rain fell in parts of Southern California’s mountains, while cities smashed summertime records....
Source: TIME: Science - August 22, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SETH BORENSTEIN / AP Tags: Uncategorized California climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Wildfires Will Put $11 Billion Worth of U.S. Property At Risk Every Year By 2050
Photos of the ashen remains of homes, hotels, and historic sites, blackened and burned by the Maui wildfires, make clear the scale of loss from such a tragedy. So far experts have estimated $3.2 billion worth of property damage. And that’s not to forget the more than 110 people who died, and the many others who are now without a home. It’s a stark reminder of the cost climate change is already having.
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But unless swift action is taken to dramatically cut emissions and transition to clean energy, more homes across the U.S. may find themselves in the path of wildfir...
Source: TIME: Science - August 17, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Kyla Mandel Tags: Uncategorized climate change embargoed study healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
How to See the Perseid Meteor Shower —and Why It ’ s Special
Space is a punishing place—frigid, airless, sizzling with radiation. But for so unforgiving an environment, it does put on stunning spectacles, with its comets, eclipses and, for people with telescopes, dazzling views of exotic worlds like ringed Saturn and its litter of moons. This time of year, space regularly stages one of its most dazzling productions: the Perseid meteor shower. The brightest meteor shower of the year began on July 14 and will continue until Sept. 1, but peaks this week on Aug. 11, 12, and 13.
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The best viewing hours are from midnight to just befor...
Source: TIME: Science - August 11, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Russia Is About To Launch Its First Moon Rocket In Nearly 50 Years
The last time Russia sent a spacecraft to the moon, Gerald Ford was in the White House, Elton John’s “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart,” was the U.S.’s number one hit, and a gallon of gas cost ¢0.57. That spacecraft, Luna 24, lifted off on Aug. 9, 1976, landed in the moon’s Mare Crisium (Sea of Crisis), and returned to Earth on Aug. 22, 1976, carrying 170 gm (6 oz.) of lunar soil. Oh, and it actually wasn’t Russia that launched Luna 24 at all; it was the Soviet Union, which still had 15 years to live before its ultimate fall on Dec. 25, 1991.
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Source: TIME: Science - August 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Antarctica is Experiencing Extreme Climate Impacts, Say Scientists
Even in Antarctica—one of the most remote and desolate places on Earth—scientists say they are finding shattered temperature records and an increase in the size and number of wacky weather events.
The southernmost continent is not isolated from the extreme weather associated with human-caused climate change, according to a new paper in Frontiers in Environmental Science that tries to make a coherent picture of a place that has been a climate change oddball. Its western end and especially its peninsula have seen dramatic ice sheet melt that threatens massive sea level rises over the next few centuries, while ...
Source: TIME: Science - August 8, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MELINA WALLING / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Why Experts Are Skeptical About That Supposed Superconductor Breakthrough
On Saturday July 22, researchers in South Korea published a paper announcing the synthesis of what could be the world’s first ambient-temperature superconductor.
If their findings are genuine, then the implications are huge. But most experts are skeptical. Researchers around the world are trying to replicate and verify the Korean researchers’ findings. The most credible attempts have found that LK-99—the name the Korean researchers gave the material—is not actually superconductive at room temperatures.
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For now, the reliability of the findings...
Source: TIME: Science - August 3, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Will Henshall Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
A New Age of Water is Dawning
We’re living in a pivotal moment in history, on the cusp of either sinking into a dark period of growing poverty, accelerating ecological destruction, and worsening conflict, or moving forward to a new age of equity, sustainability, and stewardship of the only planet in the universe where we know life exists. I believe a positive future is not only possible, but inevitable, but solving our current crises and moving along the path to that desired future will require new, concerted, and sustained efforts.
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Nothing better exemplifies both the threat and the promise facing ...
Source: TIME: Science - August 3, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Peter H. Gleick Tags: Uncategorized climate change Excerpt freelance Source Type: news
In Just 7 Months, the World Used an Entire Year ’ s Worth of Planetary Resources
For most people, Aug. 2, 2023 has been a day that’s gone largely unremarked upon. But for the planet as a whole, it was a very big—and very bad—date. Aug. 2 marked this year’s so-called Earth Overshoot Day—the day on which the annual resources humanity extracts from the earth exceeds the planet’s ability to regenerate them in the same year. Haul more fish from the ocean than can breed in their place? That’s an overshoot. Pump more fresh water from a lake or river or aquifer than can be replaced by rain, snow melt, or groundwater? That’s an overshoot.
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Source: TIME: Science - August 2, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
