Tag: Science

More than 3 billion years ago, Mars intermittently had liquid water on its surface. After the planet lost much of its atmosphere, however, surface water could no longer persist. The fate of Mars's water—whether it was buried as ice, confined in deep aquifers, incorporated into minerals or dissipated into space—remains an area of ongoing research, one of particular interest to LASP Senior Research Scientist Bruce Jakosky, former principal investigator of the Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN (MAVEN) mission.

Taking children to the supermarket isn't always top of the list for parents, but the family grocery shop can have a positive influence on children's future buying habits.

CubeSats have a lot of advantages. They are small, inexpensive, and easily reproducible. But those advantages also come with significant disadvantages—they have trouble linking into broader constellations that allow them to be more effective at their observational or communication tasks. A team from the University of Albany thinks they might have solved that problem by using a customized calibration algorithm to ensure the right CubeSats link up together.

A Jilin University team has reported a novel strategy using pressure engineering to identify the organic–inorganic interaction sites in non-hydrogen-bonded hybrid metal perovskites. This approach offers valuable guidance for designing materials with targeted optical properties and provides new insights into the photophysical mechanisms in hybrid perovskites.

In the study of why and how animals look the way they do, color is king—at least, the range of color humans can see. A University of Michigan study has examined a color range that humans can't see and often ignore: color in the ultraviolet range. Examining snakes, the researchers categorized how the animals used patterns of UV color and tested for factors that promote the evolution of UV color in snakes.

Geological resources such as critical metals and minerals, essential for the diffusion of technologies such as renewable energy and energy storage towards a decarbonized society, are indispensable for supporting modern life in the form of various products and services. Their demand is expected to increase in the coming years, owing to the global population as well as economic growth.

A study conducted by researchers at ESPOL has developed genetically improved bean varieties that are capable of withstanding water scarcity conditions. This discovery is crucial for developing more efficient agricultural strategies. Growing drought-resistant bean varieties will not only ensure stable production but also reduce dependence on excessive irrigation. This promotes more sustainable agriculture.

Researchers have been reporting a disturbing rise in sexist, misogynist behavior from students in school classrooms.

When we observe distant celestial objects, there is a possible catch: Is that star I am observing really as reddish as it appears? Or does the star merely look reddish, since its light has had to travel through a cloud of cosmic dust to reach our telescope?

Scientists warned on Thursday that the long-term health of Inuit hunters in eastern Greenland was under threat, due to so-called "forever chemicals" in the atmosphere and their diet of polar bear and seal meat.

Congratulations to Brian Thornton, winner of The Conversation Prize for writers.

Adelle Hulsmeier’s project uses student films to help police tackle complex crimes.

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This series offers insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks.

Dubai has many images. Being a hub for international research probably isn’t one, yet

What Universal Impact has learnt from a year of producing the Research Reach Roundup newsletter

The latest Independent Social Research Foundation conference heard how refugees have died after becoming trapped at the border between Poland and Belarus

Alfred Hermida: ‘The scholars who write for The Conversation are taking on journalistic practices, guided and mentored by our team of professional journalists’

The Conversation UK, Curtis Brown and Faber are pleased to announce our three judges for The Conversation Prize for writers: Miriam Frankel, senior science editor at The Conversation UK, Priya Atwal, historian…

The 3MT® competition was sponsored by The Conversation’s Universal Impact subsidiary

Today, a federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration to offer reinstatement to all probationary employees previously fired from the departments of Agriculture, Defense, Energy, Interior, Treasury and Veterans Affairs.

Fluid-rock interactions on ancient Mars may have produced abundant magnetic minerals that preserved unusually intense records of the planet’s now-extinct magnetic field.

Research indicates that delicate deepwater corals tolerated or adapted to major climate and salinity fluxes, “yet today, it’s a complete massacre.”

The first greenhouse gas budget for Central and West Asia—24 countries, including Yemen, Türkiye, Kazakhstan, and Afghanistan—was just published.

Since physical and chemical erosion yield comparable carbon fluxes, studying both together is essential to avoid biases in erosion-driven carbon flux estimates.

The Landslide Blog is written by Dave Petley, who is widely recognized as a world leader in the study and management of landslides. I rarely write about landslides on other planetary bodies, primarily because this is outside of my comfort zone. However, the European Space Agency (ESA) image below popped up on my feed this […]

EPA administrator Lee Zeldin announced today that the agency would kick off a review of EPA rules and redefine “waters of the United States” to ensure that the agency aligns with the 2023 Supreme Court decision Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which limited the implementation of the Clean Water Act.

When U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy met to sign a minerals agreement on 28 February, their discussion devolved into a heated, and widely covered, exchange. The minerals agreement, if signed, would result in half of Ukraine’ future revenue from minerals and natural resources going to the United States, in exchange for U.S. military support.

The relationship between topography and the terrestrial water cycle has been documented for thousands of years, yet there is still much to learn about Earth’s complex dynamics – both above, at, and below the surface.

Yesterday, news broke that a memo from Lee Zeldin, the new administrator of the EPA, directed the agency to eliminate all offices that focus on environmental justice. 

Open access notables Would Adding the Anthropocene to the Geologic Time Scale Matter?, McCarthy et al., AGU Advances: The extraordinary fossil fuel-driven outburst of consumption and production since the mid-twentieth century has fundamentally altered the way the Earth System works. Although humans have impacted their environment for millennia, justification for a new interval of geologic time lies in the radical shift in the geologic record that marks this “Great Acceleration” of the human enterprise. The rejection of a proposal to define the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch with a “golden spike” in varved sediments from Crawford Lake, Canada, means that we officially we still live in the H

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink Good data visualizations can help make climate change more visceral and understandable. Back in 2016 Ed Hawkins published a “climate spiral” graph that ended up being pretty iconic – it was shown at the opening ceremony of the Olympics that year – and is probably the second most widely seen climate graph after Hawkins’ later climate stripes. However, I haven’t previously come across any versions of the spiral graph showing daily global temperatures, so I thought it would be fun to create my own (with, I should note, a bit of help from OpenAI’s o3 model to c

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters Finally, there’s some good news to report from NOAA, the parent organization of the National Hurricane Center, or NHC: During the highly active 2o24 Atlantic hurricane season, the NHC made record-accurate track forecasts at every time interval (12-, 24-, 36-, 48-, 60-, 72-, 96-, and 120-hour forecasts), according to the preliminary 2024 NHC Forecast Verification Report released on Feb. 24. And 2024 research suggests that the research dollars spent since 2007 on improved hurricane forecasts could have led to over $10 billion in combined benefits

A listing of 32 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, March 2, 2025 thru Sat, March 8, 2025. This week's roundup is again published by category and sorted by number of articles included in each. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category and number of articles shared: Climate Change Impacts (13 articles) Australia’s second-hottest summer in 2024-25 ‘not possible without climate change’, scientist says  2024-25

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is Greenland losing land ice? Data from satellites and expeditions confirm Greenland has been losing land ice at an accelerating rate for decades. Glaciers gain ice via snowfall, while melting and ice breaking off into the ocean account for nearly all of Greenland’s ice-sheet loss. Rates vary season to season and year to year due to weather variation&md

Open access notables Snow Mass Recharge of the Greenland Ice Sheet Fueled by Intense Atmospheric River, Bailey & Hubbard, Geophysical Research Letters: Atmospheric rivers (ARs) have been linked with extreme rainfall and melt events across the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS), accelerating its mass loss. However, the impact of AR-fueled snowfall has received less attention, partly due to limited empirical evidence. Here, we relate new firn core stratigraphy and isotopic analyses with glacio-meteorological data sets from SE Greenland to examine an intense AR in mid-March 2022. We demonstrate that the associated snowfall—up to 11.6 gigatons d−1&m

This video includes personal musings and conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Adam Levy and climate communicator Becky Hoag. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). In just a few weeks President Donald Trump has done everything he can to attack climate action - from halting research to censoring data. But Earth's not going down without a fight. Environmental groups, scientists, states and countries are fighting back for our planet - doing what they can to protect climate research and safeguard environmental policy. Becky and I break down all the climate action for ya! Support ClimateAdam on patreon: https://patreon.com/climateadam Check out Becky's Youtube channel:

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Jeff Masters and Bob Henson One month into the new Trump administration, firings of scientists and freezes to U.S. research funding have caused an unprecedented elimination of scientific expertise from the federal government. Proposed and ongoing cuts to agencies like the National Weather Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, could hobble efforts to keep Americans safe during and after disasters. Meanwhile, slashed funding for climate research risks blindfolding the U.S. as the dangers from climate change escalate in the coming years and decades, scientists warn. Mass layoffs at FEMA When Hurricanes Helene and Milton – both made 

A listing of 34 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, February 23, 2025 thru Sat, March 1, 2025. This week's roundup is again published soleley by category. We are still interested in feedback to hone the categorization, so if you spot any clear misses and/or have suggestions for additional categories, please let us know in the comments. Thanks! Stories we promoted this week, by category: Climate Policy and Politics (17 articles) Trump bars federal scientists from working on pivotal global climate report   by Ella Nilsen & Laura Paddison, CNN, Climate, CNN, Feb 21, 2025

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Are high CO2 levels harmless because they also occurred in the past? While the Earth adapted to high carbon dioxide levels in the past, modern civilization cannot without major consequences. Past periods of high CO2 brought about a climate vastly different from our own. During the Eocene “hothouse” period around 55 million year