Anyone Hoping for Aliens to Contact Earth Will Have to Wait Another 400 Years At Least
Nobody knows for certain what the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi did or didn’t say at the lunch with colleagues at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico that took place in 1950. But as the perhaps apocryphal story has it, Fermi was holding forth on the sheer number of stars in the sky and the sheer number of intelligent civilizations the planets orbiting them might harbor, and puzzling out why we’ve never seen or heard any sign of them. “Where is everybody?” Fermi is said to have asked. That question, now known as the Fermi Paradox, has long bedeviled astronomers and other sc...
Source: TIME: Science - December 21, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

The Mars InSight Lander Is Powering Down. Here ’ s What It Discovered Over its Lifetime
The tweet that came from Mars Monday morning actually didn’t originate from anywhere near there. It came from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., where the mission of the Mars InSight lander is managed. Still, the message was a poignant one. “My power’s really low,” read the tweet, which was accompanied by a picture taken by the spacecraft, “so this may be the last image I can send. Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will—but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks fo...
Source: TIME: Science - December 20, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

A New Satellite Will Study How Climate Change is Altering Nearly All of Earth ’ s Water
The universe is thought to harbor uncounted worlds that are home to water. The one we know best, of course, is our own, and as of 3:46 a.m. PT this morning, we set about working to know it better still. That was the moment, as NASA reports, that the SWOT (Surface Water and Ocean Topography) satellite blasted off aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket to begin a three year campaign to study the height and health of freshwater bodies and oceans across 90% of the Earth’s surface. Jointly built by NASA and the Centre National d’Études Spatiales (CNES), the French space agency, SWOT will monitor the entire Earth&rs...
Source: TIME: Science - December 16, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

Crewmembers Are Trapped Aboard the International Space Station Until a Leak Is Fixed —Or Rescue Arrives
Things got dicey yesterday aboard the International Space Station (ISS). Late in the day, Russian cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitry Petelin were preparing for a spacewalk when exterior cameras showed a stream of white flakes pouring from the Soyuz spacecraft attached to the station. Simultaneously, telemetry indicated a drop in pressure in the Soyuz’s coolant tank, indicating that it was the source of the leak. Ground controllers ordered Prokopyev and Petelin, who were already suited up and preparing to exit the station, to scrub the spacewalk and stay indoors until the problem could be sorted out. The developme...
Source: TIME: Science - December 15, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

The Arctic is Heating Up, Disrupting the Planet and Local Communities, NOAA Report Shows
Mid-September, 2022, was not a good time to be living along the Bering Coast in Western Alaska. That was the week Typhoon Merbok, a Category One storm, struck the region, packing sustained winds of 130 km/h (80 mph), causing 15 m (50 ft.) waves and inundating communities along 1,600 km (1,000 mi.) of coastline. Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy declared a state of disaster on Sept. 17, saying at the time, “The storm hitting the coastal regions of western Alaska is unprecedented.” And indeed it was. Merbok was caused by unusually warm coastal waters in the North Pacific, part of the overall change in climate that h...
Source: TIME: Science - December 14, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized adaptation climate change Climate Is Everything healthscienceclimate Source Type: news

The U.S. Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Is a Huge Milestone —But Unlimited Clean Energy Is Still Decades Off
In some ways, scientists at the Department of Energy’s National Ignition Facility (NIF) have been a bit down and out. The $3.5 billion facility was designed to replicate the atom-smashing reactions that occur inside the sun, a difficult process that requires enormous amounts of heat and pressure, and could theoretically solve humanity’s energy and climate woes. But technical obstacles put NIF a decade behind in its goal of achieving fusion “ignition,” that is, getting more energy out of one of those reactions than it put in. The facility uses the largest lasers in the world to try and do that, focu...
Source: TIME: Science - December 13, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change energy Explainer healthscienceclimate Source Type: news

Ancient Galaxies Revealed by Webb Unveil Clues About What Happened Just After The Big Bang
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has ticked a lot of boxes in the near year it’s been aloft. Fly safely to its appointed spot in space 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth? Check. Successfully deploy its mirror, scientific instruments, and tennis court-sized sun shield? Check. Begin returning eye-popping images like none ever seen before? Check. Now, the Webb has delivered on its biggest promise to date. According to a new, not-yet peer-reviewed paper on the pre-publication website arXiv, and presented on Dec. 12 at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Webb’s mission control, the telesc...
Source: TIME: Science - December 13, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

NASA ’ s Orion Spacecraft Splashes Down in Triumphant End to Lunar Mission
NASA picked a very good morning to return from the moon. It was 50 years ago today that the crew of Apollo 17 landed in the Taurus Littrow Valley on the lunar surface, where they planted the last of six flags Apollo crews would leave behind to mark their moments in history. Today, the space agency planted a new, if symbolic flag, when the Artemis 1 mission’s Orion crew capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean 320 km (200 mi.) off the coast of Baja California, Mexico, at 9:40 a.m. Pacific Time. The safe return marked the end of a 25-day lunar orbital mission, proving the flight-worthiness of the Orion spacecraft, wh...
Source: TIME: Science - December 11, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news

Mars May Have Active Volcanoes, Adding New Promise to Search for Extraterrestrial Life
One of the great differences between Mars and Earth involves what’s going on beneath the surface. Our planet remains a tectonically and volcanically active world—witness the current eruptions in Hawaii—while Mars has been a cold, geologically dead place for the past three billion years. That was the thinking at least. But a new paper in Nature Astronomy challenges that accepted wisdom. Mars, it suggests, may still be geologically active today. The findings are the result of orbital photography, surface data, and computer modeling of a lowland region near the Martian equator known as Elysium Planitia&mdas...
Source: TIME: Science - December 9, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

NASA Will Test a High Stakes Re-Entry Maneuver With Artemis 1 on Sunday
The crew of Apollo 8 had a lot of things on their minds when they splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Dec. 27, 1968, after becoming the first humans to orbit the moon—and one of the biggest was the matter of the sharks. The spacecraft hit the water at 4:51 a.m. Hawaiian-Aleutian time, more than an hour before the Pacific sunrise. A recovery crew of Navy frogmen was standing by on the nearby USS Yorktown, but they dared not jump into the water until day broke—and the astronauts dared not exit their spacecraft—because sharks prowl in the predawn darkness. Only when the sun came up would it be safe to atte...
Source: TIME: Science - December 8, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized Explainer healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

Scientists Warn That Global Policies Need to be ‘Nature-Positive’
(MOMBASA, Kenya) — Scientists around the world are warning governments who will be gathering in Montreal this week for the United Nations biodiversity summit to not repeat past mistakes and are urging officials to “avoid trade-offs” between people and conservation needs in a report Monday. The study published in the One Earth Journal found that even though there has been an increase in investment in conservation over the last three decades governments “have not succeeded in bending the curve on biodiversity decline.” The conference known as COP15, which begins Tuesday, hopes to set the goals f...
Source: TIME: Science - December 5, 2022 Category: Science Authors: WANJOHI KABUKURU / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate Nature & Science wire Source Type: news

SpaceX Plans to Beat NASA in Launching the Biggest Rocket Ever
NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS) moon rocket officially became the most powerful rocket ever flown when it lifted off in the early morning hours of Nov. 16, putting out a prodigious 4 million kg (8.8 million lbs) of thrust. That comfortably beat the old record holder—the Apollo era’s Saturn 5, with its 3.4 million kg (7.5 million lbs) of thrust. But the SLS won’t hold that title for long. As Space.com reports, earlier this week, SpaceX successfully test-fired 11 of the 33 engines on its Brobdingnagian Super Heavy rocket, a beast of a machine that, when all of its engines are lit, will produce more t...
Source: TIME: Science - December 2, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

Nicole Mann, the First Native American Woman in Space, on Gardening in Zero Gravity
Nicole Mann was busy growing dwarf tomatoes aboard the International Space Station (ISS) this morning just before I reached her by phone, in a call patched from New York through Mission Control in Houston, Texas, and up to the station, orbiting 400 km (250 mi.) above the Earth. Dwarf tomatoes are no minor thing for a station program preparing human beings for long-term stays on the moon and later Mars, where they will have to learn to live off the land—which includes growing their own food. “I was testing out the different light sources and different fertilizers to see how that affects the growth of the tomatoe...
Source: TIME: Science - December 1, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Space Source Type: news

Forget Electric Cars, The Future of Battery Technology is in Airplanes
Richard Wang is trying to bring lighter, more powerful batteries to the world. The best way to do that, he says, is by electrifying airplanes. Wang is the founder and CEO of battery startup Cuberg, which is trying to use new, advanced chemical combinations to develop better batteries than the lithium-ion cells that serve as workhorses for laptops, cell phones, and electric vehicles. There are a lot of companies trying to do something similar—QuantumScape and Sila Nanotechnologies, to name a couple—each with a different pitch as to what chemical makeup or materials science breakthrough is going to deliver the g...
Source: TIME: Science - November 23, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Alejandro de la Garza Tags: Uncategorized climate change Climate Innovators healthscienceclimate Transportation Source Type: news

Why We Buy Things We Don ’ t Need
Searching for an explanation for compulsive shopping, I recently ran across the story of a woman who couldn’t stop buying rabbits. Her husband told doctors that each day, she would visit the market and return home with yet another furry creature in a compulsive habit that appeared almost like an addiction. Then she would feel guilty about all the rabbits she had purchased. The reason this 70-year-old woman was suddenly buying so many rabbits? She had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which scientists believe is caused by a lack of dopamine in some parts of the brain, and she had then been put on drugs to...
Source: TIME: Science - November 21, 2022 Category: Science Authors: Alana Semuels Tags: Uncategorized biztech2030 climate change Retail Sustainability TIME 2030 Source Type: news