In the hot and sticky suffocation of summer, air conditioners are a breezy balm. And as climate change heats Earth, the need for them is only rising. Yet the cold air blowers consume a ton of energy. But now researchers say they have a solution for these energy hogs that actually helps the climate. In a new analysis, scientists argue for using air conditioning units to capture carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere and transform it into fuel. The idea is that these renewable-ener ...read more

Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) is a debilitating condition that leaves its suffers with many questions but few answers. CFS's causes are poorly understood, there’s no cure, and there isn't a definitive way to screen for it. Now, scientists say they've taken a big step toward developing a test to diagnose this confusing and complex disorder that leaves patients with symptoms that range from extreme exhaustion, chronic pain, persistent brain fog, and more. In a new study pub ...read more

The great Age of Exploration may be over on Earth, but it’s just getting going on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. It's a world larger than even the planet Mercury. NASA's Cassini spacecraft surveyed the moon (along with Saturn and its other moons) for 13 years, and even deployed a lander, Huygens, to Titan’s surface. But although Cassini’s mission ended in 2017, its data lives on, and planetary scientists continue to learn more about the history and surf ...read more

(Inside Science) -- Earth’s interior teems with movement and heat, a characteristic that manifests in memorable fashion as volcanoes and earthquakes. But even Earth’s more seemingly stable solid rocks move, too. Understanding just how rocks respond when they are pushed and pulled by natural forces, such as tectonic activity, or human-caused forces, like hydraulic fracturing, can make mining, construction, natural gas production and other projects safer. It can also improve geological ...read more

Five hundred years before the Incan empire reached its height in South America, a different civilization reigned: the Wari. One of the Wari’s claims to fame is that they were early brewers of a drink called chicha. The fermented beverage was made by the Inca after them and can still found in Peru today. Many variations of the drink have been common across Central and South America for centuries New evidence, recently published in the journal Sustainability, suggests  this beer relat ...read more

Back in 2015, the black hole V404 Cygni got the attention of astronomers all over the globe when it suddenly brightened for two weeks. The outburst happened as the black hole began gobbling up material from a star that orbits it once every days. As the material swirled into the black hole, it heated up enough to glow brightly. Then, the black hole starting shooting some of that material far out into space as bright jet beams. When astronomers took a close look at the jets, th ...read more

The oceans are crawling with viruses. An international team of researchers surveyed the world’s oceans from pole to pole, sampling the waters for the microorganisms and they found nearly 200,000 of them. Although we mostly think of viruses in terms of being sick, in the oceans, viruses and other marine microbes have an outsized impact on marine ecosystems. Their role is so large in fact that the researchers say the microorganisms can help predict how the oceans will respond to climat ...read more

For the past few decades, if you asked an astronomer how the moon was created, nearly all of them would tell you that a Mars-sized world nicknamed Theia crashed into the early Earth, sending a cloud of debris high into space where it coalesced into our silvery satellite. And there's strong evidence to support this idea. But dig deeper, and you'll find nagging problems with the theory. Almost all models of the giant impact imply that the moon should still contain a lot of The ...read more

It may look more like the impression of a jellybean in Play-Doh, or excavations for a kidney-shaped swimming pool, but researchers say the find, at about 15,600 years old, is the oldest human footprint in the Americas — and the latest evidence that people were living throughout the New World much earlier than thought. According to paleontologists, the single footprint — technically called an ichnofossil, or ichnite — belonged to a human. The impression, preserved in ...read more

(Inside Science) -- A newfound fossil that scientists described as perplexing, beautiful and the platypus of the crab family is now shedding light on how its crustacean relatives evolved, a new study finds. Paleontologists examined more than 70 exceptionally well-preserved specimens of the entirely new branch of the crab evolutionary tree, along with hundreds of fossils of shrimp and other kinds of crustaceans, from deposits in Colombia and the United States that are 90 million to 95 mill ...read more