Justin Rowlatt,Climate editor and Jessica Cruz,South America producer BBC / Tony Jolliffe The Amazon rainforest could face a renewed surge of deforestation as efforts grow to overturn a long-standing ban that has protected it. The ban – which prohibits the sale of soya grown on land cleared after 2008 – is widely credited with curbing…
How many squid short-finned pilot whales (Globicephala macrorhynchus) living off Hawaiʻi must eat each day, and whether the surrounding waters can support their needs, are key questions for conservation. Understanding these fundamentals helps scientists assess the stability of whale populations. A research team from the USA, Spain, Australia and Denmark reports in the Journal of…
Electricity keeps modern life running, from cars and phones to computers and nearly every device we rely on. It works through the movement of electrons traveling through a circuit. Although these particles are far too small to see, the electric current they produce flows through wires in a way that resembles water moving through a…
Astronomers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have found that the well-known Pleiades star cluster, often called the “Seven Sisters,” represents only the bright center of a much larger community of related stars. By analyzing data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) and the European Space Agency’s Gaia space telescope, the…
Swift observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) have captured a star in the act of exploding, right as the blast pushed through its surface. This moment revealed the shape of the explosion during its earliest stage, a phase so brief that it would have disappeared from view within a day….
A major international research effort is reshaping the long-held belief that lead exposure is primarily a modern problem. The new findings show that early human ancestors encountered lead repeatedly for more than two million years, suggesting that this toxic metal may have played an unexpected role in shaping the evolution of hominid brains, behavior, and…
The Korea Research Institute of Standards and Science (KRISS, President Lee Ho Seong) has captured the first-ever observation of water repeatedly freezing and melting at ultrahigh pressures above 2 gigapascals (2 GPa) while remaining at room temperature. These rapid changes were recorded on a microsecond (μs, one-millionth of a second) timescale. This achievement led to…
Milestone results released by the Large High Altitude Air Shower Observatory (LHAASO) on November 16 have finally clarified a decades-old puzzle in astrophysics: the unusual drop in cosmic ray counts above 3 PeV that produces what scientists call the “knee” in the cosmic ray energy spectrum. The cause of this steep decline has remained mysterious…
Researchers led by Keiya Hirashima at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS) in Japan, working with partners from The University of Tokyo and Universitat de Barcelona in Spain, have created the first Milky Way simulation capable of tracking more than 100 billion individual stars across 10 thousand years of evolution. The…
Counties in Pennsylvania that contain or sit close to cultivated cropland show notably higher melanoma rates than other parts of the state, according to new research led by scientists at Penn State. Researchers at the Penn State Cancer Institute reviewed cancer registry data collected from 2017 through 2021 and discovered that adults over age 50…
