The Science We Need to Save Migratory Birds
Migratory birds are almost a perfect metaphor for hope—so much so that Emily Dickinson’s line “hope is the thing with feathers” has become a cliché. Every year, just when we feel like the cold, gray months of winter may never end, migratory birds return from their wintering ranges to refill our fields and forests with color and song. In the darkest spring of my life, when I was facing a cancer diagnosis just as the world was shutting down due to COVID in 2020, birds were one of the things that kept me going. Noting the return of warblers, tanagers, and buntings that spring gave me something t...
Source: TIME: Science - April 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Rebecca Heisman Tags: Uncategorized Excerpt freelance Science Source Type: news
In Five Years, China Will Start Building a Lunar Base With Bricks Made From Moon Soil
China plans to start building a lunar base in about five years, kicking off with bricks made of moon soil, according to scientists with ties to the project, the South China Morning Post reported.
Ding Lieyun, a top scientist at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, told local media that the first brick would be made from moon soil during the Chang’e 8 mission around 2028.
China has previously said its lunar base will likely be powered by nuclear energy, and will include a lander, hopper, orbiter and rover, all of which would be constructed by the Chang’e 6, 7 and 8 missions. It wasn’t immediately...
Source: TIME: Science - April 12, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Anurag Kotoky / Bloomberg Tags: Uncategorized bloomberg wire healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news
How Climate Change Is Making Your Seasonal Allergies Symptoms Worse
(Source: TIME: Science)
Source: TIME: Science - April 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Andrew D. Johnson Tags: Uncategorized Explainer health News Source Type: news
Going, Going, Gone. Climate Change Makes Home Runs Fly Out Of Ballpark, New Study Shows
Over the past decade, baseball has witnessed a power surge, as home runs have flown out of ballparks at record rates. In 2019, for example, pitchers gave up 1.4 home runs per nine innings, the highest home run rate for any reason on record, and a 55.6% increase over the 2011 rate. (Through the first five days of this season, batters continued to slug homers at a record pace.) Many fans and pundits believe that this rise in home runs, and an accompanying surge in strikeouts—batters are swinging for the fences—has plagued the game, robbing baseball of “small-ball” action (think singles and stolen base...
Source: TIME: Science - April 7, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Sean Gregory Tags: Uncategorized climate change Source Type: news
We ’ ve Now Discovered the Four Oldest Galaxies Ever Observed
Nobody knows exactly when the 13.8-billion-year-old universe first switched on its stellar lights, but the best guess for the emergence of the earliest stars and galaxies is sometime in the first 400 million years. Determining precisely when in that ancient epoch the great illumination occurred is one of the main goals set for the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched on Dec. 25, 2021 and has been hard at work scanning the heavens since it completed its deployment and its instruments came online in the summer of 2022.
This week, Webb hit paydirt. According to two papers published in the journal Nat...
Source: TIME: Science - April 6, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized Space Source Type: news
U.S. Launches Major Wildlife Corridor Project to Protect Animals From Busy Roads
(SANTA ANA PUEBLO, N.M.) — Native American tribes, as well as state and local governments will be able to tap into $350 million in infrastructure funds to build wildlife corridors along busy roads and add warning signs for drivers in what federal officials are billing as the first-of-its-kind pilot program to prevent collisions and improve habitat connectivity.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg was expected to roll out more details about the program during a visit to Santa Ana Pueblo on Tuesday. Wildlife managers with the New Mexico tribe have documented recent mountain lion casualties along a busy federal...
Source: TIME: Science - April 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SUSAN MONTOYA BRYAN / AP Tags: Uncategorized animals climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Will Deadly Tornadoes Be More Common With Climate Change? It ’ s Complicated
For the past two years, a group of scientists at Northern Illinois University has been trying to answer one of the trickiest questions in the field of climate modeling: will human-caused global warming bring more supercell tornado-spawning thunderstorms like the ones that killed at least 25 people in Mississippi late last month, and which killed at least 33 people across a broad swath of the South and Midwest United States over this past weekend?
Scientists already know that continued carbon pollution from fossil fuels will bring more intense heat waves, rain pattern changes that will cause drought in some areas and flood...
Source: TIME: Science - April 4, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change Explainer extreme weather healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Meet NASA ’ s Next Team of Astronauts to Visit the Far Side of the Moon
Time was, there were 24 living astronauts who could boast of having visited the moon. The years and mortality have taken their toll, and half a century on, that rarefied fraternity has dwindled to 10 very old men. Today, however, NASA took a big step toward adding to their ranks, announcing the names of the four astronauts who will fly around the far side of the moon on the Artemis II mission scheduled for launch sometime in November 2024.
The crew is made up of three Americans and one Canadian astronaut, and includes the first woman and first person of color to visit the moon. They will fly a 10-day journey that will swin...
Source: TIME: Science - April 3, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news
How to Harness Mega Seaweed Blobs For a More Sustainable Future
On Oct. 7, 1492, Christopher Columbus, aboard his ship the Santa María, had been at a complete standstill for 21 days, trapped in a very strange sea which he would later name the Sargasso Sea—sargazo in Spanish meaning “gulfweed.” Today, the Sargasso Sea—an elliptical expanse in the southwestern Atlantic at the center of which lies Bermuda—is six times the size of France, and is the only sea in the world with no shoreline. There was great anxiety among Columbus’s sailors as their already heavily rationed food supplies dwindled the longer they remained stuck. Not the slightest wind...
Source: TIME: Science - March 30, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Vincent Doumeizel Tags: Uncategorized Books climate change Excerpt healthscienceclimate Oceans Sustainability Source Type: news
More States Want Students to Learn About Climate Science. Ohio Disagrees
If you attend a college-level earth science class in Ohio in the coming years, you might learn about how climate change is causing heat waves, flooding, and record storms, and how humanity has a shrinking window to drastically cut emissions and forestall the worst effects. But your instructor could also be forced to spend a big chunk of time talking about how a few largely discredited researchers and fossil-fuel funded lobbyists don’t think there’s really much of an issue.
That’s because just last week, the state senate began debating the Ohio Higher Education Enhancement Act, which would tie the hands o...
Source: TIME: Science - March 29, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Is Everything healthscienceclimate Ohio policy Source Type: news
The Persistent Myth About Planetary Alignments
History does not record who the weeping woman was who joined the giant crowd at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on Feb. 4, 1962. But she was inconsolable.
“I know it’s silly to carry on this way,” she said with a hitching breath to a reporter from the Griffith Observer magazine. “But I can’t help myself.” The cause of her profound distress: On that day, the Sun, the moon, and all five non-Earthly planets from Mercury to Saturn were arranged in a cosmic conga line within a tiny 17-degree patch of the sky. The alignment foretold terrible things, said many: earthquakes, floods, a d...
Source: TIME: Science - March 29, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news
Rat Infestations Are a Global Problem. Is Birth Control the Solution?
Not every politician is willing to admit they owe their election to rats. But Laura Mikulski, city councilwoman for Ferndale, Michigan isn’t shy about attributing her political career—literally—to skeevy, long-tailed rodents.
Mikulski, who educated herself in all things rat control, is the co-founder of the Ferndale Rat Patrol. She created a citizens’ movement to accurately assess the local scope of its burgeoning rat problem, embrace less environmentally harmful methods of pest control, and even host a month-long census, called Traptoberfest, in which participants win gold-painted spring trap trop...
Source: TIME: Science - March 27, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Lisa Abend Tags: Uncategorized animals feature freelance Source Type: news
5 Planets Will Be Lined Up in The Night Sky This Week. Here ’ s What to Know
Keep an eye to the sky this week for a chance to see a planetary hangout.
Five planets—Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, Uranus, and Mars—will line up near the moon.
Where and when can you see the 5 planets?
The best day to catch the whole group is Tuesday. You’ll want to look to the western horizon right after sunset, said NASA astronomer Bill Cooke.
The planets will stretch from the horizon line to around halfway up the night sky. But don’t be late: Mercury and Jupiter will quickly dip below the horizon around half an hour after sunset.
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The five-planet spread ca...
Source: TIME: Science - March 27, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MADDIE BURAKOFF / AP Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space wire Source Type: news
How to Encourage More Climate-Friendly Habits, According to Science
Among many well-intentioned people working on the uneasy border between climate action and consumption-based capitalism, there’s long existed a consensus that consumers of everything from coffee to dry shampoo are basically rational creatures. If you can label which particular brand of toilet paper isn’t destroying the planet, you’ll help that bath tissue win in the marketplace, and put the bad toilet paper brands out of business. That’ll cut pollution, and help save the world. It hinges on toilet paper shoppers making sane decisions—but that seems like a fair assumption, right? They’d b...
Source: TIME: Science - March 24, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change Economy healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Where Mining and Energy Projects Will Hurt Wildlife the Most
The world faces an incredibly tricky land crunch over the coming decades. On the one hand, we want to protect more wildlife, having realized the critical role nature plays in limiting climate change and sustaining human life. On the other hand, we want to generate more energy than ever before for fast-developing countries in the Global South, and transition the entire world to renewables. That’s going to require a lot of new power plants and mines, which can be devastating for wildlife.
A study published today in the journal Biological Conservation highlights that mammoth clash of interests. Researchers looked at a l...
Source: TIME: Science - March 23, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Ciara Nugent Tags: Uncategorized climate change Conservation embargoed study healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
