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Feb 13, 2025 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
Even though immense rains repeatedly pummeled California in 2023, they barely helped recharge aquifers drawn down by decades of drought and human pumping, a new study reveals. About one-third of the water supply in Los Angeles, which is susceptible to long dry spells, comes from groundwater. But in the first three months of 2023, more than a dozen atmospheric rivers — long, narrow weather systems chock full of water vapor — brought rainfall to the West Coast.
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Jan 10, 2025 | 
science.org | Paul Voosen |Sid Perkins
It’s a record foretold: 2024 was the hottest year in human history, even hotter than the record-breaking year before it. Global surface temperatures were somewhere between 1.45°C and 1.6°C higher than the average from 1850 to 1900, multiple climate monitoring groups reported today. “We are now living in a very different climate from that which our parents and our grandparents experienced,” said Samantha Burgess, deputy director of Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
Roughly one-third of Americans could be exposed to a long-sought, newly identified breakdown product of some chlorine-based water treatments. Although the toxicity of the by-product, an electrically charged molecule, is yet to be determined, analyses suggest the substance could have several detrimental health effects.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
A red dwarf star known as Barnard’s star, which lies a mere six light-years from our solar system, has at least one — and possibly a handful — of small rocky planets orbiting it, a new study suggests. Barnard’s star, which is about one-sixth the mass of our sun, is the closest individual star to our solar system. Only the three stars in the Alpha Centauri system are closer.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
While SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are enabling internet access and cell phone communications around the globe, they’re also posing a threat to radio astronomy, a new study suggests.
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Sep 12, 2024 | 
snexplores.org | Douglas Fox |Sid Perkins |Thomas Sumner
Yellowstone National Park is known for its bubbling hot springs and steaming geysers. These hydrothermal wonders are powered by a massive cauldron of partly melted rock deep underground. It holds enough seething magma to build several Mount Everests. Yellowstone’s volcano last erupted 70,000 years ago. If it did so again, it could bury a vast area under lava. Most scientists consider this unlikely, at least for the next several thousand years.
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Sid Perkins
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Aug 22, 2024 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
Shorelines worldwide have always been vulnerable to coastal erosion, a phenomenon rendered more ominous by rising sea levels that accompany modern-day climate change (SN: 9/29/22). Coastal engineers have few ways to address this erosion, says Alessandro Rotta Loria, a civil engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. One method is to build a seawall; another is to truck in more sand once wave action sweeps away a beach’s supply. Neither approach works more than a few years, he notes.
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Aug 7, 2024 | 
sciencenews.org | Sid Perkins
For millennia, humans have seen inexplicable things in the sky. Some have been beautiful, some have been terrifying, and some — like auroras and solar eclipses before they were understood scientifically — have been both. Today’s aircraft, balloons, drones, satellites and more only increase the chances of spotting something confounding overhead. In the United States, unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, came into the national spotlight in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
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Jul 22, 2024 | 
newsbreak.com | Sid Perkins
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