Wildfires are becoming increasingly destructive across the U.S., as the country is seeing in 2024. Firefighters were battling large blazes in several states from, California to and North Dakota in, early October 2024, including fires burning near homes and communities.Research shows wildfires are up to four times larger and three times more frequent than they were in the 1980s and ‘90s, with some consuming hundreds of thousands of acres in a single blaze.Lightning strikes are one cause, but th ...read more
Our home star, the sun, is a middle-aged main sequence star. That is to say, it is roughly halfway through its lifecycle and is an average-sized star compared to the spectrum of stellar types that can be found elsewhere in our galaxy and beyond. Life, in its 4.5 billion-year journey on Earth, has had an intimate relationship with the sun. It provides life with its main source of energy via photosynthesis, it keeps temperatures within a balmy range, and its energy drives many of Earth's cycles o ...read more
Hurricane Milton became one of the most rapidly intensifying storms on record as it went from barely hurricane strength to a dangerous Category 5 storm in less than a day on a path across the Gulf of Mexico toward Florida.With sustained winds that reached 180 mph on Oct. 7, 2024, and very low pressure, it also became one of the strongest Atlantic storms.Milton’s winds dipped to Category 4 strength early on Oct. 8, but forecasters warned that it would still be an extremely dangerous hurricane a ...read more
NASA plans to send humans on a scientific round trip to Mars potentially as early as 2035. The trip will take about six to seven months each way and will cover up to 250 million miles (402 million kilometers) each way. The astronauts may spend as many as 500 days on the planet’s surface before returning to Earth.NASA’s Artemis program plans to return humans to the Moon this decade to practice and prepare for a Mars mission as early as the 2030s. While NASA has several reasons for pursuing su ...read more
Hurricane Helene caused deadly and destructive flooding when it swept through the Southeast on Sept. 26-29, 2024. Across a broad swath of western North Carolina, where the worst flooding occurred, the amount of rainfall exceeded levels that would be expected on average only once every 1,000 years.But this wasn’t the first 1,000-year rainstorm in North Carolina this year. In mid-September, an unnamed slow-moving storm produced more than a foot of rainfall closer to the Atlantic coast. This stor ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine