The Webb Telescope Spots Six Galaxies That Shouldn ’ t Exist
It isn’t easy to build a galaxy. The universe is a good 13.8 billion years old and the earliest galaxies ever detected—spotted by the James Webb Space telescope last November—did not form until 350 million years after the Big Bang. Not only did that infant universe take its time bringing forth its first galactic masses, it also didn’t build very big ones once it got around to it. The first galaxies were often dwarf galaxies—containing perhaps 100 million stars—compared to the size of modern galaxies like our Milky Way, which is believed to contain a minimum of 100 billion stars. Early ga...
Source: TIME: Science - February 22, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

No, You Shouldn ’t Be Afraid of Fungi
By now, you’ve probably heard about “zombie fungi”, which are able to puppet the behaviour of their insect hosts with magnificent precision. One such fungus, Ophiocordyceps unilateralis, infects carpenter ants. Once infected by the fungus, ants are stripped of their instinctive fear of heights and climb up the nearest plant. In due course the fungus forces the ant to clamp its jaws around the plant in a “death grip.” The fungus then digests the ant’s body and projects a stalk-like structure out of its head, from which spores shower down on ants passing below. Unlike the fictional killer ...
Source: TIME: Science - February 19, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Giuliana Furci and Merlin Sheldrake Tags: Uncategorized climate change Evergreen freelance Source Type: news

What Ants Can Teach Us About Working Together
If you’re reading this, you’re probably not an ant. In fact, it is exceedingly likely that you’re human. Perhaps you’re a construction worker, laying bricks for a new high-rise building downtown. Or maybe you’re a parent, engaged in a near futile struggle to lay your howling baby to rest each night. You could even be an office worker, toiling away each day for the benefit of a faceless corporation while struggling to even find the time to enjoy Marvel’s Ant-Man in theaters. But what if you were an ant? What could social insect living do for you? Every individual worker in an ant colony i...
Source: TIME: Science - February 17, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Heather Campbell and Benjamin Blanchard Tags: Uncategorized Evergreen freelance Science Source Type: news

What New ‘ Doomsday ’ Thwaites Glacier Research Tells Us
There is a reason Antarctica’s Thwaites Glacier is often referred to by its supervillain moniker. ‘Doomsday Glacier’ better sums up the consequences should the Florida-size slab of ice collapse due to rising temperatures: a global sea level rise of more than 2 ft., enough to wipe out low-lying island nations and many of the world’s major coastal cities. But while drastic, the projected timeline for such a melt, over the course of a century or more, offered some comfort—time to figure out a solution, or at least adapt. A recently completed field study, undertaken by the International Thwaites G...
Source: TIME: Science - February 16, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Aryn Baker Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything embargoed study Explainer healthscienceclimate Nature & Science Source Type: news

Migrating Could Help Plants Escape Climate Change. But They Need Our Help
When we talk about climate migration, we don’t normally picture a seed blowing uphill in the wind, or landing in a cooler place among a pile of fox poop. Yet just like humans, plants around the world are being forced to find new homes because of shifting climate conditions in their original habitats. The problem is, according to two new studies, they don’t always make it where they need to go. The sheer speed of temperature increases in the climate crisis era, combined with the fragmentation of landscapes by human activity, is making it harder for trees and other plants to follow their preferred climate condit...
Source: TIME: Science - February 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Ciara Nugent Tags: Uncategorized climate change Conservation embargoed study healthscienceclimate Source Type: news

Plants Must Migrate to Survive Climate Change. But They Need Our Help
When we talk about climate migration, we don’t normally picture a seed blowing uphill in the wind, or landing in a cooler place among a pile of fox poop. Yet just like humans, plants around the world are being forced to find new homes because of shifting climate conditions in their original habitats. The problem is, according to two new studies, they don’t always make it where they need to go. The sheer speed of temperature increases in the climate crisis era, combined with the fragmentation of landscapes by human activity, is making it harder for trees and other plants to follow their preferred climate condit...
Source: TIME: Science - February 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Ciara Nugent Tags: Uncategorized climate change Conservation embargoed study healthscienceclimate Source Type: news

Fruit Flies Are Spreading Across U.S. Crops. The Government ’s Outdated Approach Isn’t Helping
For two weeks in August, a crew of workers systematically confiscated every orange in Vince Bernard’s groves in Valley Center, Calif. They buried the oranges—at least $500,000 worth of fruit, Bernard says—in ditches on his neighbor’s property. They did so by order of the U.S. government, which came accompanied by armed California Highway Patrol officers and which did not pay Bernard a penny for the crops. Bernard’s oranges were destroyed because the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA) found five Mexican fruit flies on a neighbor’s property, which it considers “an i...
Source: TIME: Science - February 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Alana Semuels Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything Food & Drink healthscienceclimate Source Type: news

Not Everything is a Spy Balloon or UFO. Here ’ s What Else Is Flying in Our Skies
Ever since Feb. 4, when the U.S. shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina, the military has been in something like skeet-shooting mode, blasting three more unidentified aerial objects out of the sky on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday (Feb. 10, 11, and 12). The first of the three, spotted by North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) radar over the northern coast of Alaska was described by fighter pilots as a metallic, cylindrical airship; it was flying at about 40,000 ft.—low enough to menace civilian aircraft. How it stayed aloft was not clear. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] &...
Source: TIME: Science - February 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized Explainer healthscienceclimate policy Source Type: news

Whales Are Dying Along the East Coast. And a Fight Is Surfacing Over Who ’ s to Blame
In mid-January, threatening social media messages started showing up on the accounts of a small New Jersey organization devoted to rescuing ocean mammals that wash up on the beach. Some said “we’re watching you.” Others accused staff of the Marine Mammal Stranding Center (MMSC) being “whale murderers.” Some people wrote that they were going to show up at the group’s Brigantine, N.J., headquarters and “make” members of the wildlife organization “come to [their] side.” “You don’t know what they’re gonna do,” says Michele Pagel, 49, the group&...
Source: TIME: Science - February 13, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change energy healthscienceclimate Nature & Science Oceans Source Type: news

The Mars Curiosity Rover Finds Evidence of Ancient Water in a Surprising Spot
There’s a very good reason NASA planners chose Mars’s Gale Crater as the landing site for the Curiosity Rover when it touched down on the Red Planet in the summer of 2012. Gale Crater was once Gale Lake, a brimming body of water that could have given rise to microbial life in the first billion years of Martian history, before the planet lost most of its atmosphere and water to space. If you want to find clues to exobiology, a place like Gale is where to start looking. Now, as NASA reports, Gale Crater is proving itself to be an even more fertile spelunking spot than once believed. [time-brightcove not-tgx=̶...
Source: TIME: Science - February 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

How a Boom in Mega Rockets Will Get Astronauts Back on the Moon
If you want to get to the moon, you need a mega rocket. NASA’s got one, in the form of the Space Launch System (SLS), a 32-story monster with a record setting 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs.) of thrust. The rocket launched on its maiden voyage in November, placing an uncrewed Orion spacecraft in lunar orbit—a mission dubbed Artemis I. Crewed missions are set to follow soon; the question is how soon. The space agency has promised that Artemis II will carry four astronauts on a journey around the far side of the moon as early as next year, with Artemis III sticking a crewed lunar landing in 2025 or 2026 and furthe...
Source: TIME: Science - February 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

15 Million People Live Under Threat of Sudden, Deadly Flooding as More Glaciers Melt
As glaciers melt and pour massive amounts of water into nearby lakes, 15 million people across the globe live under the threat of a sudden and deadly outburst flood, a new study finds. More than half of those living in the shadow of the disaster called glacial lake outburst floods are in just four countries: India, Pakistan, Peru and China, according to a study in Tuesday’s Nature Communications. A second study, awaiting publication in a peer-reviewed journal, catalogs more than 150 glacial flood outbursts in history and recent times. It’s a threat Americans and Europeans rarely think about, but 1 million peopl...
Source: TIME: Science - February 7, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SETH BORENSTEIN / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change extreme weather healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news

20 Years On, How the Columbia Shuttle Disaster Changed Space Travel
Folks around NASA don’t much care for this time of year. It was 56 years ago last week—January 27, 1967—that astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee lost their lives in a launch pad fire inside their Apollo 1 spacecraft as they were running a dress rehearsal for countdown. It was 37 years ago—on January 28, 1986—that the shuttle Challenger exploded during launch due to a faulty seal that caused one of the solid rocket boosters to ignite the external fuel tank. The pair of solid boosters flew on heedlessly, leaving a gruesome, two fingered fireball in the sky as seven astronauts per...
Source: TIME: Science - February 1, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

Brazil Wants to Abandon a 34,000-Ton Ship at Sea. It Would be an Environmental Disaster
Somewhere in the South Atlantic ocean right now, a 34,000-ton, 870-ft. aircraft carrier is floating aimlessly on the waves. The vessel, caught in an international dispute over its toxic contents, is about to become one of the biggest pieces of trash in the ocean. The São Paulo, as the ship is known, has been stuck in limbo for five months. Brazil’s navy sold the 60-year-old vessel—the largest in its fleet—for scrap to a Turkish shipyard in 2021, and in August 2022, it set off for Turkey from a naval base in Rio de Janeiro. But while it was on the move, Turkey rescinded its permission to enter, sayi...
Source: TIME: Science - January 31, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Ciara Nugent Tags: Uncategorized brazil healthscienceclimate Londontime Oceans Source Type: news

U.S. Universities Aren ’ t Getting Enough Funding to Tackle Agriculture ’ s Climate Impact
One of the most overlooked sources of carbon emissions comes from the food we eat. In the United States, greenhouse gasses from agriculture make up 11% of total emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Slightly more than half of that comes from farming and land clearing. The rest comes from the meat and dairy industry, largely in the form of methane from cattle burps and nitrous oxide from animal manure treatments, both of which are even more effective at warming the earth in the short term than CO2. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] Yet, compared to other high emitting sectors, such as tran...
Source: TIME: Science - January 31, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Aryn Baker Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything Food & Agriculture healthscienceclimate Londontime overnight Source Type: news