(Credit: Kaushik Panchal/Unsplash)
For a cloud to appear, it takes more than water vapor. Water won’t condense into droplets, or nucleate, without a surface to do so on, and this often takes the form of particles floating around the atmosphere so tiny as to be invisible. Called aerosols, these particles play an important role in everything from the pace of climate change to the water cycle because they influence how clouds form and grow.
Natural aerosols come from any number of ...read more
(Credit: Radu Bercan/shutterstock)
In Kurt Vonnegut’s dystopian novel, Player Piano, things get a little awkward after industrialist Dr. Paul Proteus, escorted in a black government limo, passes a crew of “Reeks and Wrecks,” or displaced laborers who could no longer compete economically with the machines that filled factories like Proteus’ Illium Works.
In the street, some 40 construction workers are hunched over shovels and pitchforks, all watching a single man fill a ...read more
The smokey conditions are so bad that one Canadian newspaper has labeled it a “smoke-pocalypse”
A thick, widespread smokey blanket was seen over northwestern North America by the Suomi-NPP spacecraft on Aug. 15, 2018. (Source: NASA Worldview)
I was going to take a break from covering the wildfires blazing across large swaths of western North America — until I checked on remote sensing data this morning and saw the satellite imagery above and lower down in t ...read more
The beetle Cretoparacucujus cycadophilus, trapped in amber along with grains of pollen for 99 million years, likely used highly specialized mandibles for pollination. (Credit Chenyang Cai)
A new species of beetle, preserved in a piece of amber along with several grains of pollen, is the earliest direct evidence of an insect pollinating an ancient plant group nearly 100 million years ago. It’s also just supercool to look at.
To understand why this new beetle with the gigantic nam ...read more
Photo: flickr/wackyvorion
[Note from the authors of “Seriously, Science?”: After nine years with Discover, we’ve been informed that this will be our last month blogging on this platform. Despite being (usually) objective scientists, we have a sentimental streak, and we have spent the last few days reminiscing about the crazy, and often funny, science we have highlighted. Therefore, we have assembled a month-long feast of our favorite science papers. Enjoy! ...read more
Neutron stars are extreme objects composed of 95 percent neutrons and five percent protons.(Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center)
Neutron stars are the remnants of violent supernovas, all that’s left behind when a star tens of times the mass of our sun ends its nuclear fuel-burning life. These extreme objects pack more mass than our sun — about 1.4 suns’ worth of mass, to be more exact — into a stellar remnant about the width of a small city (6 to 12 miles [ ...read more
The tiny dwarf galaxy Fornax UCD3 (inset) orbits around a giant elliptical galaxy called NGC 1399. Astronomers used the Very Large Telescope in Chile to discover a supermassive black hole at UCD3’s heart. (Credit: Courtesy of NASA/STScI/ESO/Afanasiev et al.)
A small galaxy some 70 million light-years from Earth has been hiding a big secret.
This week, astronomers announced they’d found a supermassive black hole (SMBH) lurking at the center of a galaxy called Fornax UCD3. It’s ...read more
(Credit: swa182/shutterstock)
BOULDER, Colo. – Severe storms cause tens of billions of dollars in property damage each year. And that cost will likely go up in the coming years thanks in large part to hailstorms.
Climate scientists, meteorologists and insurance experts gathered at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) here in Boulder, Colorado, this week for a three-day workshop to discuss how climate change affects these storms and brainstorm how to better detect and forec ...read more
