The Year ’ s Most Spectacular Photos from the James Webb Telescope
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It’s been both a punishing and triumphant two years for the James Webb Space Telescope. Launched on Christmas Day 2021, the $10 billion observatory spent its first 30 days traveling through the deep freeze of deep space until it reached its destination 1.6 million km (1 million mi.) from Earth. This region marks a spot where the gravity of the Earth and the sun neutralize each other, allowing the Webb telescope to hang stationary in space. Once in position, the telescope spent several more months bringing its hardware online and deploying a tennis-court-sized sunshiel...
Source: TIME: Science - December 22, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
What You Need to Know About Winter Solstice 2023
Thousands of solstice enthusiasts will engage in a range of rituals and activities to celebrate the winter solstice, otherwise known as the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere.
This year the solstice falls on Dec. 21 for the U.S. and Dec. 22 in Europe, marking the (astronomical) beginning of winter, although there are also meteorological seasons that mark winter as starting in early December through February.
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The winter solstice is also the day in which the earth’s tilt away from the sun is at a maximum, making the lack of direct sunlight...
Source: TIME: Science - December 21, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Solcyre Burga Tags: Uncategorized News Desk Source Type: news
The One Thing Our Brains Rely on to Generate New Ideas
Humanity’s evolutionary superpower is our behavioral flexibility. As we go through life, we learn how to navigate the world, building a store of knowledge, habits, and policies that have served us well in the situations we’ve encountered. But there will always be new scenarios that may require new solutions—something we’ve never done before or even thought of doing before. Such scenarios require “thinking outside of the box,” and when we need to do that, we draw on an unlikely resource: a little bit of randomness in the brain circuits that offer up options for action.
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Source: TIME: Science - December 21, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Kevin J. Mitchell Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news
What We Lose When We Can ’ t Stargaze
I once met a physics graduate student at a cosmology school (I’ll call him Max) who, until his late 20s had believed that you could only see the stars with a telescope. Max had grown up in New York City, where the twilight of artificially lit nights dissolved the firmament. When he discovered the “permanent presence of the sublime,” as poet Ralph Waldo Emerson described it in his 1836 essay “Nature,” patiently awaiting on a clear, dark night, he was mesmerized.
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What do we lose when our connection with our cosmic environment is broken?
The nig...
Source: TIME: Science - December 15, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Roberto Trotta Tags: Uncategorized freelance Source Type: news
How to Watch this Week ’ s Spectacular Geminid Meteor Shower
Harvard astronomer Fred Whipple thought he did not have much to show for his night’s labors on Oct. 11, 1983. Yes, working with NASA’s Infrared Astronomical Satellite, he had discovered an entirely new cosmic object—which is always a nice thing to put on the scientific tote board. But that object was an unremarkable one. Measuring only 5.1 km (3.17 mi.) across and dimly illuminated, it was thought to be either a dead comet—one that had lost its ices and other volatiles after repeated passes by the sun; or a rock comet, which also lacks volatiles, but which nonetheless gives off tail-like particles l...
Source: TIME: Science - December 12, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Jeffrey Kluger Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
Iran Says It Launched Animals Into Orbit in Preparation for Human Space Missions
TEHRAN — Iran said Wednesday it sent a capsule into orbit carrying animals as it prepares for human missions in coming years.
A report by the official IRNA news agency quoted Telecommunications Minister Isa Zarepour as saying the capsule was launched 130 kilometers (80 miles) into orbit.
Zarepour said the launch of the 500-kilogram (1,000-pound) capsule is aimed at sending Iranian astronauts to space in coming years. He did not say what kind of animals were in the capsule.
Read More: Meet the Heroic Animals That Went Into Space Before Humans
State TV showed footage of a rocket named Salman carrying the ca...
Source: TIME: Science - December 6, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Associated Press Tags: Uncategorized News Desk wire Source Type: news
Global Carbon Emissions Keep Increasing
(DUBAI, United Arab Emirates) — The world this year pumped 1.1% more heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the air than last year because of increased pollution from China and India, a team of scientists reported.
The increase was reported early Tuesday at international climate talks, where global officials are trying to cut emissions by 43% by 2030. Instead, carbon pollution keeps rising, with 36.8 billion metric tons poured into the air in 2023, twice the annual amount of 40 years ago, according to Global Carbon Project, a group of international scientists who produce the gold standard of emissions counting.
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Source: TIME: Science - December 5, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Seth Borenstein / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
A Six-Planet Solar System in Perfect Synchrony Has Been Found in the Milky Way
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Astronomers have discovered a rare in-sync solar system with six planets moving like a grand cosmic orchestra, untouched by outside forces since their birth billions of years ago.
The find, announced Wednesday, can help explain how solar systems across the Milky Way galaxy came to be. This one is 100 light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
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A pair of planet-hunting satellites — NASA’s Tess and the European Space Agency’s Cheops — teamed up for the observations.
No...
Source: TIME: Science - November 29, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MARCIA DUNN / AP Tags: Uncategorized News Desk wire Source Type: news
Google DeepMind AI Breakthrough Could Help Battery and Chip Development
Researchers at Google DeepMind have used artificial intelligence to predict the structures of more than 2 million new materials, in a breakthrough that could have wide-reaching benefits in sectors such as renewable energy and computing.
DeepMind published 381,000 of the 2.2 million crystal structures that it predicts to be most stable.
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The breakthrough increases the number of known stable materials by a factor of ten. Although the materials will still need to be synthesized and tested, steps which can take months or even years, the latest development is expected to...
Source: TIME: Science - November 29, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Will Henshall Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news
World Must Cut Emissions By 42% by 2030 to Meet 1.5C Paris Goal
The globe is speeding to 2.5 to 2.9 degrees Celsius (4.5 to 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit) of global warming since pre-industrial times, set to blow well past the agreed-upon international climate threshold, a United Nations report calculated.
To have an even money shot at keeping warming to the 1.5-degree Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) limit adopted by the 2015 Paris climate agreement, countries have to slash their emissions by 42% by the end of the decade, said the U.N. Environment Programme’s Emissions Gap report issued Monday. Carbon emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas rose 1.2% last year, the report sa...
Source: TIME: Science - November 20, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SETH BORENSTEIN / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
SpaceX Launches Giant New Rocket But Explosions End the Second Test Flight
SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship but lost both the booster and the spacecraft in a pair of explosions minutes into Saturday’s test flight.
The rocketship reached space following liftoff from South Texas before communication suddenly was lost. SpaceX officials said it appears the ship’s self-destruct system blew it up over the Gulf of Mexico.
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Minutes earlier, the separated booster had exploded over the gulf. By then, though, its job was done. Saturday’s demo lasted eight or so minutes, about twice as long as the first test in April, which also end...
Source: TIME: Science - November 18, 2023 Category: Science Authors: MARCIA DUNN / AP Tags: Uncategorized News Desk wire Source Type: news
Climate Change is Hitting Every Part of Americans ’ Daily Lives, Major Report Warns
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Revved-up climate change now permeates Americans’ daily lives with harm that is “already far-reaching and worsening across every region of the United States,” a massive new government report says.
The National Climate Assessment, which comes out every four to five years, was released Tuesday with details that bring climate change’s impacts down to a local level.
Overall, it paints a picture of a country warming about 60% faster than the world as a whole, one that regularly gets smacked with costly weather disasters and faces even bigger pro...
Source: TIME: Science - November 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SETH BORENSTEIN and TAMMY WEBBER / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Apart From EV Sales, World Is Failing To Keep Key Climate Goals on Track
The world is off track in its efforts to curb global warming in 41 of 42 important measurements and is even heading in the wrong direction in six crucial ways, a new international report calculates.
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The only bright spot is that global sales of electric passenger vehicles are now on track to match what’s needed — along with many other changes — to limit future warming to just another couple tenths of a degree, according to the State of Climate Action report released Tuesday by the World Resources Institute, Climate Action Tracker, the Bezos Earth Fund and ot...
Source: TIME: Science - November 14, 2023 Category: Science Authors: SETH BORENSTEIN / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
Frank Borman, Astronaut Who Led the Apollo 8 Mission to the Moon, Dies at 95
BILLINGS, Mont. — Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10 times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, has died. He was 95.
Borman died Tuesday in Billings, Montana, according to NASA.
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Borman also led troubled Eastern Airlines in the 1970s and early ’80s after leaving the astronaut corps.
But he was best known for his NASA duties. He and his crew, James Lovell and William Anders, were the first Apollo mission to fly to the moon — and to see Earth as a distant sphere...
Source: TIME: Science - November 10, 2023 Category: Science Authors: Associated Press Tags: Uncategorized remembrance wire Source Type: news
Last 12 Months on Earth Were The Hottest Ever Recorded, Analysis Finds
The last 12 months were the hottest earth has ever recorded, according to a new report by Climate Central, a nonprofit science research group.
The peer-reviewed report says burning gasoline, coal, natural gas and other fossil fuels that release planet-warming gases like carbon dioxide, and other human activities, caused the unnatural warming from November 2022 to October 2023.
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Over the course of the year, 7.3 billion people, or 90% of humanity, endured at least 10 days of high temperatures that were made at least three times more likely because of climate change.
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Source: TIME: Science - November 9, 2023 Category: Science Authors: ISABELLA O'MALLEY / AP Tags: Uncategorized climate change healthscienceclimate wire Source Type: news
