By Will Dunham (Reuters) – About 4,000 years ago, the last of Earth’s woolly mammoths died out on a lonely Arctic Ocean island off the coast of Siberia, a melancholy end to one of the world’s charismatic Ice Age animals. But what doomed this last mammoth population on Wrangel Island? A new genomic analysis deepens […]
China has become the first nation to collect material from the far side of the moon and return it to Earth. The Chang’e-6 lunar module, which collected the sample, completed its historic mission with a touchdown in China’s northern Inner Mongolia region around 2pm local time on Tuesday (June 25). The sample is the first […]
A rare nova explosion will soon be visible in the Earth’s nighttime sky, according to officials at NASA. The event, which could occur anytime between now and September, is creating a buzz within the astronomy community, as both professional and amateur astronomers alike will be able to see the explosion. “We’re definitely noticing a lot […]
The rotation of Earth’s inner core began to slow down more than a decade ago, altering the length of our days by fractions of a second. Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) created renderings of the inner core’s movement using seismic data recorded from various earthquakes and nuclear tests, both of which send […]
The heart of our planet has been spinning unusually slowly for the past 14 years, new research confirms. And if this mysterious trend continues, it could potentially lengthen Earth’s days — though the effects would likely be imperceptible to us. Earth’s inner core is a roughly moon-size chunk of solid iron and nickel that lies […]
At the height of the American war machine’s realization that China controls nearly all of its raw materials, two new developments in Europe now suggest that the West has a fighting chance to secure critical metals for the future: A major discovery in Norway, and a potentially game-changing acquisition in Greenland. In mid-June, Norwegian mining […]
By Melanie Burton and Fabio Teixeira MELBOURNE/RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Mining giant Brazil has big ambitions to build a rare earths industry as Western economies push to secure the metals needed for magnets used in green energy and defence and break China’s dominance of the supply chain. Working to its advantage are low labour […]
A California company has tech that will likely draw attention from the Punkin Chunkin community. That’s because SpinLaunch is developing a large rotating arm that uses kinetic energy to fling 440-pound satellites into low orbit, with successful tests already in the books. Importantly, the process doesn’t need rocket fuel to work. It’s all powered by […]
A missing piece of Earth’s evolutionary timeline may have been found. Using computational modeling, a team of scientists explored how working backwards from modern biochemistry could help map out how simple, non-living chemicals present on early Earth gave rise to complex molecules that led to the emergence of life as we know it. Researchers believe […]
Earth may be swimming through an ocean of dark matter — and waves in that invisible ocean lapping against our planet’s upper atmosphere may generate detectable radio waves that allow us to finally find this elusive component of the universe, according to new theoretical research. A wealth of astrophysical and cosmological evidence points to the […]
How different are Jupiter‘s gaseous layers and Earth’s oceans? Perhaps not as much as you expect. Lia Siegelman, a physical oceanographer at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been studying Jupiter through the lens of Earth’s oceans to determine what powers the gas giant’s raging cyclones. “Jupiter is basically an […]
Likened to oil in the 21st century, rare earth metals have long been pitched as game-changing materials for the global energy landscape. Mined for their magnetic properties, the 17 metals are used in everything from mobile phones to electric vehicle engines and wind turbines, and are a mainstay of clean energy technologies. Despite their name, […]