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Paying More to Stay Cool, Super El Niño, Solar Politics
Energy affordability and data center opposition are among the most potent political messages in 2026. The Drain is a roundup of climate news.
Did life-friendly planets really form just after the Big Bang? Science stirs debate - Futura-Sciences
Standard models of galactic evolution indicated that the universe needed several billion years after the Big Bang to produce enough heavy elements for rocky planets. Vorobyov and co-author Daniel Whalen at the University of Portsmouth tested the accuracy of the time scale using computational models. Their team found evidence that...
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4975-4981: Happy 14th Landing Anniversary
By Susanne P. Schwenzer, Professor of Planetary Mineralogy at The Open University, UK
State canvassers approve Michiganders for Money Out Of Politics ballot language
State canvassers approve ballot language for proposal to ban Michigan utilities, large government contractors from political donations.
Next Generation of Planetary Scientists Learn Public Engagement Skills
FORCE is a world-class laboratory that uses high-pressure experimental equipment to recreate the extreme conditions found deep within Earth and other planetary bodies, enabling researchers to better understand how planets form, evolve, and behave under immense pressures.
Ferrari 250 GT Sperimentale Wins 2026 Gran Turismo Trophy at Pebble Beach
A one-off Ferrari regarded as the first prototype for the 250 GTO has won the Gran Turismo Trophy at the 2026 Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance, putting it in line for a potential future appearance in the game series.
10 moving images from the International Nature Photography Festival
A reminder that our planet is worth protecting.
Inside Phoebe Bridgers’ Lost Weekend Planetarium Experience at Liberty Science Center
The largest planetarium in the Western Hemisphere in Jersey City was transformed into an immersive, kaleidoscopic light and sound experience.
Neptune’s tiny moons may be the wreckage of shattered ancient worlds
JWST has uncovered surprising clues that Neptune’s strange inner moons may be the wreckage of an ancient cosmic catastrophe. Researchers detected clay-like minerals on Larissa, Galatea, and Neptune’s rings that form in the presence of liquid water—yet the moons themselves show no obvious water ice. The material likely came from deep inside much larger icy moons that were shattered when Triton was captured by Neptune, destroying much of the planet’s original satellite system.
WATCH | Science to go: Mid-America adds mobile planetarium to toolkit
Students will have a new opportunity to explore science through a 360-degree immersive learning experience as Mid-America Science Museum brings its new Planetarium To Go to schools through a $30,000 grant from the Arvest Foundation.
UK 'joke' candidate Binface pushes serious point about politics
British politics has a long-cherished reputation for attracting the weird and wonderful. But in a pantheon of colorful characters, Count Binface, a man wearing a rubbish bin over his head, is stealing the show. The self-described "intergalactic space warrior" from the fictional planet Sigma IX takes on hardline anti-immigrant politician…
Curiosity Blog, Sols 4968-4974: Rock Climbing Towards the Discontinuity
Written by Lucy Lim, Planetary Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center
After a Decade of No Man's Sky, Players Have Explored Less Than 1% of the Planets
No Man’s Sky developer Hello Games is celebrating its 10-year anniversary with an eye-catching stat and a tease for the upcoming update.
‘I don’t think this is a good idea’: Veteran Bethesda world artist says Starfield having 1,000+ planets was the wrong move
“I would have done a handful of planets with bespoke layouts”, the Fallout 3/4…
🚨 Total split: UEFA, AFC and CONCACAF issue statement against Infantino
Political earthquake in world football. The three most influential confederations on the planet —UEFA, AFC and Concacaf— have published a heartbreaking open letter directly accusing Gianni Infanti...
Slow spin could explain why planets become hellish
Hundreds of Venus-like planets could soon help determine why some worlds become sweltering greenhouse hellscapes, but to fully understand that, scientists first need to know how fast those planets are spinning.
How to spot the Perseid meteor shower, a summer light show that promises to dazzle
The meteor shower's peak Wednesday night into Thursday morning coincides with a total solar eclipse across Spain, Iceland and Greenland and a six-planet parade — though the best time to view the fireballs will come after totality.
At 25, the big shift: why we are sure humans heat the planet - Futura-Sciences
The Early Hints: From Wild Theories to Alarming Accuracy The idea of planetary warming isn’t new—although it once sounded more like science fiction than established fact. Back in the 1960s, a handful of pioneering researchers began suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions from human activity could warm the climate. At the...
Science Wins A Skirmish
Thank heaven for small favors: Senators on the Appropriations Committee on Sunday released a stopgap funding bill to avert a government shutdown by Oct. 1 and temporarily block a White House proposal that would fundamentally change how the federal government awards and manages grants. In late May, the Office of Management and Budget released … Continue reading "Science Wins A Skirmish"
Arvest Foundation donates $30,000 to Mid-America Science Museum
The Arvest Foundation donated $30,000 to the Mid-America Science Museum to fund a portable planetarium that will bring science education programs to various locations across Arkansas.
Earth’s molten core suddenly reversed direction — and scientists don’t know why
Earth’s molten iron core unexpectedly reversed direction beneath the Pacific, revealing a dramatic change in the hidden engine that creates our planet’s magnetic field. Satellite data suggest the surge is already weakening, raising the possibility that the deep-Earth upheaval is part of a mysterious natural cycle.
Scientists turn one of the world's most hated plastics into premium lubricant
Polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, is among the most common plastics on the planet but also one of the hardest to recycle responsibly. In a new study in Nature, scientists describe a method to strip chlorine from PVC and convert the remaining material into synthetic lubricant-based oils that perform competitively with commercial products.
SpaceX: What can scientists learn from a Falcon 9 rocket hitting the Moon?
While the collision was an accident, it is a unique scientific gift for planetary geologists that could provide important data for future space missions.
SpaceX: What can scientists learn from a Falcon 9 rocket hitting the Moon?
While the collision was an accident, it is a unique scientific gift for planetary geologists that could provide important data for future space missions.
The Beauty Of Settled Science
Commenters convinced me I made a subtle mis-step in my framing of Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine. My framing emphasized that social priming studies had failed to replicate, but that many other subfields of psychology hadn’t. This naturally led commenters to point to failed replications in other subfields. Although none of these were as bad as social priming, few or none were entirely problem-free. Instead of emphasizing the difference between social priming and other subfields, I should have emphasized the difference between settled science and novel research. Here are some of my favorite psychology findings: The brain is sculpted by reinforcement learning, and a key driver of this learning is a prediction-error-based algorithm located in the nucleus accumbens and implemented through dopamine. Psychedelic drugs exert their effects through 5-HT2A receptors, pointing to a role for these receptors in some sort of construct like the balance between priors and new evidence. Certain cognitive functions are localized to certain brain areas (for example, impulse control to the frontal lobes; linguistic structure to Broca’s area, linguistic meaning to Wernicke’s area. But injure one of these areas, or render a certain function useless (eg a blind person having no more use for their visual cortex), and these mappings can gradually shift - suggesting that neurons are general-purpose compute whose specialization is a contingent fact about convenience and efficiency rather than a necessity. Most personality traits and general capabilities are about 50% genetic and 50% random, with little role for family environment or childhood history, with a few notable exceptions like partisan preference. Recent research complicates this story, but the further you go from this basic picture, the gnarlier the chains of indirect causation you require. Neurons fire together in “brain waves”, whose exact frequency corresponds with the character of consciousness; These divide neurons into natural subpopulations and linked graphs. The gamma rhythm corresponds surprisingly well to items in conscious awareness. GABA receptors seem to be involved in something like relaxation. By hitting different GABA receptors in different ways, you can modulate the exact type of relaxation you produce. Hitting GABA-A directly is too powerful and can cause dangerous levels of sedation, but allosteric modulation of GABA is an incredibly fruitful strategy that underlies drugs from benzos to barbituates to alcohol. If you know your GABA-A subunits, you can target specific subtypes of relaxation; for example, Ambien hits GABA-A1 and induces sleep. Memory divides somewhat fuzzily into bins of immediate-sensory, short-term, and long-term, with separate retrieval and storage functions, and separate systems for declarative vs. procedural learning. These can be harmed selectively, usually by hippocampal injury, so that some patients can remember their life stories but not form new long-term memories, or learn new skills like bike-riding but not new facts. The exact substrate of memory is unclear but seems to involve new synaptic connections between neurons in at least some way. The ability of modern psychology and psychiatry to treat mental illness is real but limited. SSRIs work for half or slightly fewer than half of patients; antipsychotics work with extreme side effects; benzodiazpines work but produce addiction and tolerance in many (not all) people. Most supplements are stuck in Poor Quality Study Replication Crisis Hell, but melatonin and l-theanine stand out as especially promising. Psychotherapy works with moderate effect size, but (with a few exceptions) seems to be more about the relationship with the provider than the details of the therapy itself. Mental hospitalization can sometimes defuse immediate crises but work less well than mental hospitals would like, with some studies showing overall negative effects. Schizophrenia is mostly genetic, but risk also increases with prenatal infection (especially rubella) and obstetric complications; there is suggestive evidence for roles of social stress and drug use (with psychedelics and marijuana making things worse, and nicotine if anything making things better). Bipolar and schizophrenia are so closely linked on a pathophysiological level that it seems like they might be the same disease; on the clinical level, they do seem to follow two separate courses/prognoses but can sometimes surprise clinicians by eg someone who seemed condemned to permanent schizophrenia unexpectedly recovering. The brain’s native reinforcement learning algorithms cash out in the phenomena of classical and operant conditioning; different reinforcement schedules reinforce at different levels, which can be exploited by bad actors to make especially compelling products (eg slot machines). None of these are immune to doubt. A few are speculative; one or two are genuinely unorthodox. But they’re all a step above one p = 0.049 paper that might not replicate. If they get overturned, they’ll be overturned by the same sort of genuine scientific shift that replaced Ptolemy with Copernicus or Lamarck with Darwin, not some sort of sordid discovery about someone entering random numbers into a spreadsheet. In 2008, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote about The Beauty Of Settled Science: If you only care about scientific issues that are controversial, you will end up with a head stuffed full of garbage. The media thinks that only the cutting edge of science is worth reporting on. How often do you see headlines like “General Relativity still governing planetary orbits” or “Phlogiston theory remains false”? So, by the time anything is solid science, it is no longer a breaking headline. “Newsworthy” science is often based on the thinnest of evidence and wrong half the time—if it were not on the uttermost fringes of the scientific frontier, it would not be breaking news. Scientific controversies are problems so difficult that even people who’ve spent years mastering the field can still fool themselves. That’s what makes for the heated arguments that attract all the media attention. Worse, if you aren’t in the field and part of the game, controversies aren’t even fun. Don’t be embarrassed to read elementary science textbooks, either. If you want to pretend to be sophisticated, go find a play to sneer at. If you just want to have fun, remember that simplicity is at the core of scientific beauty [...] A steady diet of science news is bad for you: You are what you eat, and if you eat only science reporting on fluid situations, without a solid textbook now and then, your brain will turn to liquid. Psychology isn’t centrally the new paper in Annals Of Recently-Breaking News saying that an n=5 study showing that large portion sizes increase support for terrorism. Psychology is centrally ideas like brain waves, GABA receptors, reinforcement learning, twin studies, and connectionism. People who think differently are worrying too much about BREAKING NEWS!!!, and should stop. The key distinction isn’t “recent research in social psychology” vs. “recent research in cognitive/bio/behavioral psychology”, as my essay last week unfortunately implied. It’s recent research in general vs. the deposit of settled science, battle-tested hypotheses, and carefully-earmarked speculation. And part of the reason social priming in particular was such a disaster was that it defied that heuristic, building itself up over hundreds of studies until it approached or even entered the pantheon of settled science - before collapsing (5-HTTLPR was also sort of like this). This isn’t a claim that settled science is always right - Freud was “settled science” for a long time - just that there’s an intuitive distinction between the level of credence you should have in the existence of power posing vs. the existence of Broca’s Area. (I compounded this error by calling the last post “Psychology Research Is Mostly Fine”, which suggested I was talking about the new research rather than the settled science. I actually meant to distinguish between research-psychology-the-field vs. clinical-psychology-aka-therapy, but this framing unintentionally pushed against the point I wanted to make) Some commenters on the previous article understood this point, but challenged its weight. It’s very cool, they said, to know how many neurons are in which brain lobe, but the main way that Psychology affected their lives was through bad clickbait studies used to buttress dumb policies; some p = 0.049 study says that exposure to microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel into raisins, and now their company has to implement punitive DEI or be sued for hazardous work conditions. I won’t dispute this as an accurate description of how the sausage gets made, but it’s worth examining the trains of thought that connect this observation to a campaign against psychology in general: The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad, and I don’t have good heuristics for distinguishing dumb woke psychology from other psychology, so I’m going to assume it’s all wrong and bad. The dumb woke psychology was wrong and bad; it seems useful to punish/discredit psychology as a whole to assist my campaign against it, so for propaganda purposes I will try to discredit psychology as a whole. To people in the first camp, my response is: come on, your heuristics aren’t that bad. “Microaggressions makes minorities’ brains shrivel up like raisins” is in the woke category; “the hippocampal theta rhythm seems to be associated with both memory and pathfinding, suggesting an unexpected yet surprisingly compelling relationship between the two” is in the not-woke category, don’t play dumb here. To people in the second camp, my response is: deliberately exaggerated propaganda campaigns are bad and this is a confession, not an excuse. Inability to view science through anything but a political lens was what got us into this problem; doubling down on it is a temporary solution but a recipe for permanent disaster. If you pronounce entire fields of science to be acceptable collateral damage in your campaign against bad political actors, you will alienate not just scientists but patients, clinicians, and general lovers of truth. Instead, you can say the thing you mean - that woke partisans shouldn’t try to occupy and exploit the otherwise-noble science of psychology for their own political gain - and wage the same campaign with a halo rather than a comic-book-villain goatee. From the font of oracular wisdom that is Weird Sun Twitter: [ Vessel Of Spirit@VesselOfSpirit i love you all conditionally but i love the good part of you unconditionally. even if it becomes a very small part 2:11 AM · Jan 22, 2015 1 Reply · 5 Reposts · 29 Likes ](https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/558084551772471298) This is how I feel about psychology1, too, but with a touch more optimism. The good part of psychology is enormous, a hoard of endless treasures. You just have to look past the headlines! 1 To play devil’s advocate - should one always be so magnamious? Astrology? Phrenology? These seem different in that their entire orientation was flawed from the start; they didn’t simply fail to find the correct constellation-personality connections, the whole project of searching for connections between constellations and personality was doomed from the start. More difficult might be asking the same question about education research, which is notoriously bad. I don’t know enough about education research to know if there’s some settled science of correct and enlightening results lurking in the background beyond the day-to-day froth of poorly-conducted and politically-motivated studies. I think if it’s 90% bad, 10% good, it’s correct to call it bad as a compact way of communicating a useful truth; I think psychology is better than that, but admit it’s a tough judgment call.
Castro Theatre contractor sued by Another Planet Entertainment
SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — Another Planet Entertainment has filed a lawsuit over renovations to San Francisco’s iconic Castro Theatre. The lawsuit, which was filed in San Francisco Superior…
Scientists Find Evidence Suggesting Atmosphere On Habitable "Super-Earth"
Astronomers have discovered more than 6,200 exoplanets since the first ones were found in the 1990s.
Giant waves are sweeping Mars’ atmosphere into space
The solar wind may be stripping away Mars’ atmosphere by creating giant rolling waves along its outer edge. Data from MAVEN and Tianwen-1 show that these waves form plasma clouds that carry atmospheric particles into space. The process is concentrated on one side of Mars and may have played a major role in drying out the once potentially habitable planet.
Scientists detect a sharp acceleration in global warming
Global warming appears to have shifted into a faster gear. After removing the effects of El Niño, volcanic eruptions, and solar cycles, researchers found that the planet has warmed at roughly 0.35°C per decade over the past ten years, compared with just under 0.2°C per decade from 1970 to 2015. The acceleration, which becomes visible around 2013 to 2015, appeared across five major global temperature datasets with more than 98% statistical certainty.
An Interview with Planetary Politics Director at New America Heela Rasool-Ayub
Heela Rasool-Ayub is director of the Planetary Politics initiative at New America. Before joining us for “Can the Energy Crisis Finally Unite Us?,” co-presented by Thomas Mann House and Zócalo Public Square in partnership with ASU Global Futures Laboratory and the Palisadian-Post, she joined us for a chat about economist Joseph Stiglitz, Afghan food, and the highlands of Ethiopia.
UN, scientists warn that strong El Nino will add fuel to ‘a planet already on fire’
The United Nations warns that a strengthening El Nino is intensifying global weather extremes and is adding fuel to a planet that it says is already on fire.
Molten, Mushy Planet
35 light years away from Earth is a planet a bit bigger than ours that’s probably not hospitable to life -- because it’s molten. Scientists have known about L98-59d for years, but new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope helped reveal an atmosphere rich in hydrogen sulfide, which could only be explained if the planet was in a rare molten state. Living on Earth’s El Wilson and Bella Smith teamed up on this note on emerging science.
Before dinosaurs: scientists uncover the shocking cosmic event that changed Earth - Futura-Sciences
Asteroids, Meteorites, and Humanity’s Long Fascination For thousands of years, people have witnessed meteorites falling from the sky. Fascinating and fearsome, such events sparked myths and legends long before science explained their origin. Yet, it wasn’t until January 1, 1801, when Giuseppe Piazzi discovered Ceres—a dwarf planet a little under...
Summer program explores outer space with science fair and planetarium
With summer in full swing, students at Stout Middle School turned their curiosity toward the stars this week during the DiscoverWorks Program. Throughout the five-week program, students have...
Astronomers Looking Through Forgotten Observations Find Bizarre And Beautiful Planet-Wide Rings On Venus
Looking at Venus, captured accidentally in old observations, the team found a truly odd feature that can only be seen in polarized light.
The US public is fed up with RFK Jr. To really ‘make America healthy again’, it should look to Europe
Americans are dying younger than Europeans, despite being the wealthiest people on the planet. Wellness fads won’t change that, says public health expert Devi Sridhar
After Hobbes vs Rousseau: Politics must move beyond human nature
Since the great debate between Hobbes and Rousseau, our political theory has been organised around a single question: is human nature essentially good or essentially corrupt? Graham Harman, the philosopher behind object-oriented ontology, argues that this is simply the wrong question to be asking. The real forces governing our collective fate - climate change, artificial intelligence, geography, and pandemics - are non-human; therefore, questions about human nature are not the central ones. Instead, Harman proposes a politics reorganised around our relationship to non-human objects and environments, in which quasi-government institutions incentivise and deter actions with the aim of extending the survival of the human race. “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” This has become one of the most popular phrases among twenty-first-century intellectuals. Often misattributed to Fredric Jameson, it has been warmly embraced by such influential authors as Slavoj Žižek and the tragically departed Mark Fisher, and has fueled the notion that the major problem with the political Left is that it simply needs to become more speculative and creative. Naturally, this is never a bad idea in any human pursuit. But what if the political distinction between Left, Right, and Center itself results from a failure of imagination? SUGGESTED READING Hobbes vs Rousseau: are we inherently evil? By Robin Douglass This particular division has been with us only since the summer of 1789. During the simmering prelude to the French Revolution, it referred originally to the physical position in the National Assembly of radical figures on one side and loyal monarchists on the other. These positions are linked with two entirely different camps of modern political theory. On the Left we find a series of authors ranging from the moderate (Locke) to the supercharged (Rousseau) to the truly radical (Marx), all of them contending that exploitation of the many by the few justifies revolutionary overthrow of the existing order. On the Right they are countered by the likes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Schmitt, a group of thinkers convinced that corrupt human nature can be tamed only by force. In the words of the Nazi supporter Schmitt: “One could test all theories of nature and state and political ideas according to their anthropology and classify these as to whether they consciously or unconsciously presuppose [humans] to be by nature evil or by nature good.” This is the division we continue to face today, even in the daily retail politics of Western democracies.___Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims.___The most refreshing feature of David Graeber and David Wengrow’s 2021 book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity was their awareness that the forced choice between Rousseau and Hobbes (as they put it) is no longer sufficient. Our species has regularly proven itself capable of both the noblest gestures and the most scathing cruelties, making it hard to define us as essentially either emancipatory or brutal in our aims. Far from being stationed “beyond good and evil,” we seem to be fully entangled with both. We are not naturally good or evil, Graeber and Wengrow contend, but naturally experimental and imaginative. They rest their case on the archaeological record, which seems to bear witness to numerous episodes of seasonally shifting governments and festivals, which vacillate in the same society (even in the same year) between the egalitarian and the dictatorial. Such praise of political experiment makes a good fit with the generally anarchist position defended by these authors. Yet it is also what I find most disappointing in their position. Although they are right that the forced choice between Hobbes and Rousseau falls short of what our new situation requires, the authors simply replace it with praise for the human being as a political tinkerer and performer. In other words, they give us just another theory of human nature, one that would not have been out of place in the sixteenth or seventeenth century. What other options might we have?___The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature… We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them___One fresh approach would be to treat politics within a broader framework than human nature, given that the polis does not exist in a vacuum filled exclusively with people. When Bruno Latour went to observe the baboons of Kenya with the San Diego anthropologist Shirley Strum, they jointly concluded that these primates were more socially interdependent than our own species. Each baboon is so reliant on the dynamics of the group that they find themselves locked into constant surveillance of their potentially dangerous peers. The group structure turns out to be inherently volatile. Humans, by contrast, are able to stabilize their societies to a large degree through the mediation of inanimate objects. Although one’s position in society may seem to fluctuate over time, considerable stability is produced through such items as apartment keys, wedding rings, and identification cards, all of them serving to secure us a place distinct from that of our fellows. The Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has written at length about the crucial role of documents in establishing social relations, making him a hero among notaries in his country. Proper names and license plates cement our position amidst other humans, as do symbolic achievements such as graduation from a top university or distinguished wartime service with its various medals and ribbons. None of this is found among baboons, despite their closeness to us on the evolutionary tree: after all, we did share a common ancestor just 25 to 30 million years ago. SUGGESTED VIEWING The goodness paradox With Richard Wrangham The time is ripe for a retheorization of politics on the basis of something other than human nature, whether understood in the manner of the Left or of the Right. We are not just alienated and limited by objects, but also empowered and unleashed by them. But initially, it is true, we face non-human things primarily in the form of constraints. It would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to form a human civilization underwater, deep underground, atop Mount Everest, or in outer space. Human dependence on the non-social background takes on subtler form in discussions of political geography, especially unloved on the more idealistic Left. Consider the luckless position of Poland during World War II, sandwiched between Hitler on one side and Stalin on the other. By contrast, note the good fortune of the United States in not having a military peer positioned on any land border. Anglo-American geopolitics, since the writings of the American naval commander Alfred Thayer Mahan and the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder, has been wedded to the notion that one or more liberal offshore naval powers should prevent any authoritarian “heartland” regime from gaining effective control of Eurasia. That remains the case whether the opponent is the impatient Napoleon, the swashbuckling German Kaiser, the villainous Hitler, the murderous Stalin, or the industrial juggernaut Chinese. In their current Foreign Affairs article “Heartland vs. Rimland,” Michael Beckley and Hal Brands analyze the current and coming state of the world on the basis of these same rather durable principles. In recent years a similar outlook has been embraced, in inverted form, by the Putin-loving Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, an icon of the Rightist intellectual underworld. For Dugin, the Anglo-Saxons are an evil force bent on destroying the spiritually superior people of the land: much like Athens in its failed war with Sparta, or Carthage in its eventual collapse against Rome. But the shared notion on both sides is that any strategy that fails to take geography into account is likely to end up as a defeated form of excessive optimism.___When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole.___More striking for us today than geography is the non-human object called climate, which threatens rimland and heartland equally. Even if we contend that humans are one hundred percent responsible for triggering the climate crisis, it remains non-human in the sense of being an independent force beyond our effective control. In a major work published just before his death in 2002, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, the American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted the tendency of evolutionary theorists to focus too closely on the fate of individuals in view of their successful or failed adaptation to circumstances. With climate change, however, we confront a force that goes well beyond the scope of any individual life. Whereas Richard Dawkins extended evolutionary questions downward from individuals to the sub-individual gene, Gould pushed it upward, speaking of entire species or clades as impacted by environmental change. The asteroid that struck the Yucatán 66 million years ago is only the most famous example of this sort. In the wake of that catastrophe, large animals needing abundant supplies of food were at a fatal disadvantage by contrast with the smaller birds and mammals of the planet. When dealing with environmental degradation, then, we are doing business with forces that promise dire effects on our species as a whole. The effect is to shift our attention away from individual beings towards the survival of the group.In the United States in particular, the COVID-19 pandemic sparked considerable backlash among those who asserted a nearly absolute degree of individual freedom. In California I encountered those who demanded that their businesses be allowed to reopen, that it was enough to cover their mouths but not their noses, or that they should have the right to enter any public area despite refusing vaccination. Yet public health is probably the clearest argument against libertarianism, which often merely asserts the autonomy of individuals against any claims of the commons. In normal times the individual is worth defending; under conditions that threaten the survival of part or all of our species, compulsion may be our only resort, as with perfectly reasonable blackouts and rations in wartime. To rebuild human society under the constraints of climate change will be one of the great challenges of the century to come, as will our improvised grappling with artificial intelligence. Such phenomena pose existential risks for humanity, and leave far less room for tolerance of individual brattiness. Cases are mounting of devastating wildfires caused by arson. Recently it was reported that there is even a website where one can bet on the location of coming wildfires, raising the specter of deliberate blazes set to collect on wagers. The death penalty has steadily lost support in a world where many stress the infinite value of human life. But if we focus instead on entire ecosystems, those who purposely burn the forests may begin to look worse than serial murderers.___The politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere.___So far I have spoken of force, authority, and punishment: measures sure to have greater appeal to those who identify with what we know as the Right. But other implications of the post-anthropocentric world are likely to have different backers. If non-human objects are seen as structuring political space, it stands to reason that they can no longer be introduced solely by the pace of technical breakthrough. Fields ranging from cybernetics to energy will demand increased politicization once they are reconceived not just as products of individual human investment, but as renovations of collective political geography. This need not involve world government, with its inherent risk of tyranny, but may involve quasi-governmental enforcers of prestige along the lines of a less corrupt FIFA or International Olympic Committee, punishing deviant states not with violence but with less tangible incentives.Politics will never lose its historic links with conflict and faction. But rather than factions aligned by differing theories of human nature, the politics of the future may be splintered by disagreement over such topics as how to manage our environing background and how to permit or restrict the entry of new objects into the political sphere. This will prove just as incommensurable with the modern Left/Right spectrum as a globe is with a two-dimensional map.
Correction to C.4 Planetary Science Enabling Facilities
C.4 The Planetary Science Enabling Facilities (PSEF) was recently added to ROSES-25. It solicits proposals for experimental and analytical research facilities
The Dinosaurs May Have Had Only Hours Before Extinction After the Asteroid Struck and Turned the Planet into a Global Furnace
New research suggests fine dust trapped heat from falling debris, producing a deadly pulse that could have ignited forests around the world.
Scientists Just Watched the Deep Ocean Floor Tear Itself Apart in Real Time
A new deep-sea probe witnessed the silent, violent magma flows that heal our planet’s scars.
Keys to future human exploration, past planetary conditions hide under surface of moon, Mars
Purdue research to discover what materials and potential resources beneath the Martian and lunar surfaces are important for plans to one day put humans on either planet.
New film series captures what healthcare really looks like for everyday Detroiters
Shiraz Ahmed spent half a decade documenting how Detroiters survive American healthcare. A series of shorts from the project debuts with Planet Detroit on Instagram.
Dinosaurs died out within hours, new study suggests
The Chicxulub asteroid impact may have set our whole planet on fire.
Boxing’s top 10 pound-for-pound men’s fighters, ranked by the sport’s insiders
A panel of experts from across the sport deliver their verdicts on the best fighters on the planet
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft aces Mars flyby capturing stunning timelapse video
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft aced its Mars flyby, using the planet’s gravity to speed toward its 2029 encounter with a metal-rich asteroid. The spacecraft tested its cameras, magnetometer, and particle-detecting instruments, capturing unusual views of Mars and measuring its magnetic environment. It also detected neutrons from the planet and spotted the tiny moons Phobos and Deimos.
Scientists have found an Earth-like exoplanet
The super-Earth likely contains an atmosphere
A planetarium for the brain
Neuroscientists should take a cue from astrophysicists and use planetariums to inspire awe, argues Tyler Sloan. His new film takes a first step.
RSNA seeks ideas on how radiology can help save the planet
The society on July 24 announced the launch of its new Imaging Sustainability Challenge, seeking radiology departments interested in showcasing their environmental stewardship efforts.
50 Cent and Planet Hollywood Launch $100 Million Entertainment Venture in New York City
Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson is expanding his business empire with a new $100 million partnership that aims to transform Planet Hollywood’s flagship Times Square location into a celebrity-driven entertainment destination. Jackson and Planet Hollywood founder Robert Earl announced the launch of PH Live, a new venue that will combine live music, film premieres, sporting events, […]
Planetary Health Diet lowers cardiovascular risk in older women
A 20-year study of more than 65,000 postmenopausal women found that higher adherence to the Planetary Health Diet was associated with a lower risk of overall cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, stroke and heart failure.
Kyle Gordon scores another banger.
The comedian and artist behind “Planet of the Bass” and my personal favorite, “Selekta,” has an absolutely incredible sendup parodying Paul Simon’s Graceland jaunt to Africa. Gordon is popularly compared these days to Weird Al but his ability to embed authentically in genre is even more sophisticated. He’s a shapeshifter who does real homework on his parodies. I can’t wait to see what he does next. [Media: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJBm1n8JUZ8&list=RDqJBm1n8JUZ8&start_radio=1]
Should Scientists Have Research "Reserves" on the Moon?
The worlds of the Solar System offer up exciting and (so far) mostly pristine places for planetary scientists to study. As space missions continue to travel to Mars, Europa, asteroids, and other worlds, questions keep coming up about keeping them safe for continued exploration and observations.
When It Comes to Fusion, Materials Matter
Fusion at high temperatures powers the sun and, if harnessed, could provide a potential source of energy here on Earth. But controlling fusion reactions has other benefits. The process also generates subatomic particles called neutrons that are used in a range of applications spanning medicine, research, and national security. Now, scientists at the University of California, Davis (UC Davis), and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have found that the materials surrounding a fusion reaction can dramatically increase how often it occurs, particularly at low energies where fusion is rare. The study was published July 18 in Nature Communications. Their approach sets up a way to study and engineer nuclear reactions within solid materials, opening a new field of “materials-driven fusion.” Instead of designing materials just to survive the harsh conditions of fusion, researchers might be able to design materials that boost the reaction in specific conditions, similar to the way catalysts speed up chemical processes. “It gives you a new knob to turn that you didn’t have before,” said Arun Persaud, head of the Fusion Science & Ion Beam Technology group in Berkeley Lab’s Accelerator Technology & Applied Physics (ATAP) Division. “If we understand this effect better, it opens the door to engineering new materials that would affect the fusion rate under certain conditions. Someday future progress might enable more compact and efficient neutron generators, which have all kinds of applications, like cargo screening, planetary science, and medical therapy and imaging.” In the experiment, researchers used two different methods to pack deuterium, a heavy form of hydrogen atoms that is often used in fusion, into thin foils of palladium and titanium. They then fired a beam of deuterium ions at the foils at different energies and measured how often fusion happened. Then they compared the rates from the different materials and methods with the “bare” fusion reaction (not in a material). The team found that fusion rates depended on how the deuterium was loaded into the metal foils. The biggest effect was at the lowest energies, below 2.5 kiloelectronvolts (keV), where theory predicts fusion rates drop off sharply. Instead, researchers found a surprising plateau: Some samples showed elevated fusion rates roughly a quintillion times higher than bare fusion reactions. (A quintillion is a 1 followed by 18 zeroes.) Researchers are not exactly sure why that’s happening, though they have some ideas and ways to test them. The electrons and defects within the material might partially shield repulsive electrostatic forces between deuterium nuclei, making it easier for them to get close together and fuse. Tuning the electronic structure, defects, and composition of materials could help make nuclear reactions happen more readily. “It comes down to better understanding the mechanism so that we can try to enhance it,” said corresponding author Jeremy Munday, a professor at UC Davis. “We’ve seen that we can increase fusion rates, but what is the limit? Can we bring it to lower temperatures or energies? There’s obviously a lot of interest and excitement about fusion, so if there’s something we can learn about the physics at these lower energy scales, maybe there’s something we can translate to other areas of nuclear science.” The team plans to explore a wider range of materials and continue probing the unexpected fusion plateau at lower energies. Their work establishes a reproducible experimental platform to study how solid materials influence nuclear reactions, creating a new area of research that links fusion science with materials science and chemistry. “The work shows conclusively that the material environment where fusion occurs at low temperatures is an active participant rather than a passive container,” said Cameron Geddes, director of ATAP. “That adds a new dimension to fusion research.” This work was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E). ### Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) is committed to groundbreaking research focused on discovery science and solutions for abundant and reliable energy supplies. The lab’s expertise spans materials, chemistry, physics, biology, earth and environmental science, mathematics, and computing. Researchers from around the world rely on the lab’s world-class scientific facilities for their own pioneering research. Founded in 1931 on the belief that the biggest problems are best addressed by teams, Berkeley Lab and its scientists have been recognized with 17 Nobel Prizes. Berkeley Lab is a multiprogram national laboratory managed by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. DOE’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Strange Milky Way planetary system leaves scientists puzzled
Scientists are documenting a planetary system in the Milky Way galaxy that is so starkly dissimilar to our own solar system that they are struggling to find the proper terminology to describe it.
A newly found world blurs the boundary between planet and moon
The object orbits a brown dwarf that orbits a star, and astronomers aren’t sure if it’s a planet, a moon — or something else entirely.
Rivers of magma once bubbled beneath crust of Mars, research suggests
Finding widens selection of rocky planets that may once have been habitable
Amendment 65: New Opportunity: C.4 Planetary Science Enabling Facilities
C.4 The Planetary Science Enabling Facilities (PSEF) program element solicits proposals for experimental and analytical research facilities to be made
NASA’s nuclear Mars mission to cost over $2 billion
The price tag doesn't include the cost of the science mission the new spacecraft would ferry to the Red Planet.
'It's absolutely exciting!': Astronomers discover an atmosphere around an Earth-like planet in the habitable zone for first time ever
Astronomers have detected helium escaping from the super-Earth LHS 1140 b, providing the strongest evidence yet that a rocky planet in another star's habitable zone has retained an atmosphere for billions of years.
Scientists identify the rare meteorite that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago
The asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs was likely an exceptionally rare CO chondrite from a distant region of the solar system. Its unusual chemistry suggests that planet-cooling dust and debris, rather than sulfur inside the asteroid, may have delivered the deadliest blow.
St. Louis Planetarium reopens with the most advanced hybrid system in the country
The largest upgrades in more than 25 years are officially complete at the James S. McDonnell Planetarium at the St. Louis Science Center — and the transformation is out of this world.
St. Louis Science Center’s Planetarium reopens after major upgrades
The James S. McDonnell Planetarium at the St. Louis Science Center reopened on Saturday after months of upgrades and major renovations.
Discover The Connection Between Science And The Science Fiction Of Project Hail Mary July 21 At Nature Center
PEEC News: Pajarito Environmental Education Center (PEEC) invites the community to dive deeper into Project Hail Mary with, “The Science of Project Hail Mary,” 7-8 p.m. Tuesday, July 21, in the Planetarium at the Los Alamos Nature Center. This light hearted presentation is sure to amuse scientists and science fiction fans alike. Learn more about […]
'Fireball' meteorite that smashed into New Jersey home contains ingredients of life from an ancient proto-planet, study finds
Amino acids and other "pre-biotic" molecules were spotted in a meteorite that crashed into a New Jersey home in 2024.
NASA’s Psyche Mission Delivers Mars Flyby Data, Time-lapse Video
NASA’s Psyche spacecraft flew by Mars on May 15, using the planet’s gravity to gain speed and slightly tilt its trajectory. The flyby also gave the team an
VOICES: Wildfire smoke exposes a hard truth — why staying indoors isn't enough in Michigan
I have lived my entire life in Southeast Michigan, and until the summer of 2023, wildfire smoke was not something we regularly experienced here. Today,
Rare Pair of Improbably Light ‘Super-Puff’ Planets Is Discovered
They’re less dense than cotton candy, and they will help astrophysicists better understand the most unusual ways giant planets can form.
Saint Louis Science Center's James S. McDonnell Planetarium Grand Reopening to Unveil Milestone Upgrades
/PRNewswire/ -- On Saturday, July 18 (9:30 a.m.), the Saint Louis Science Center will debut milestone technology upgrades to the James S. McDonnell...
Astronomers Find an Atmosphere on a Nearby Earthlike Planet
It’s the first potentially habitable world known to host an atmosphere, making it a lead contender in the search for life beyond our solar system.
Earth-like exoplanet could have life-supporting water on its surface
Scientists discover the first confirmed atmosphere in habitable zone outside our solar system on LHS 1140b
Scientists Discover a Planet With the Most Earth-like Conditions Yet
The discovery boosts the chances of finding extraterrestrial life.
This “exotic weirdo” exoplanet has a rocky surface and an atmosphere
Astronomers found a helium atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet — a good sign for the search for life outside the solar system.
How Sport Will Change on a Hotter Planet (We Might Have to Move the Olympics) | Climate & Energy for July 16
Plus: The Strait of Hormuz isn’t going back to normal, and the Chinese EV wave threatens Volkswagen’s vast, well-paid workforce
First atmosphere detected on a habitable-zone rocky world
In a major milestone in the search for life on other planets, astronomers have detected, for the first time, an atmosphere surrounding an Earth-like, rocky planet orbiting within the habitable zone of another star.
Harvard scientists detect atmosphere on distant ‘Earth-like’ planet
The first-of-its-kind discovery is expected to set off a search for signs of life.
NASA’s Webb Discovers Hidden Planet in Famous Star System
Astronomers using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope have discovered a giant planet outside our solar system, called an exoplanet, hiding within one of the
Astronomers Have Accidentally Discovered The Faintest Planet Ever Imaged From Earth
A short time ago in a galaxy not so far away (because it's ours).
Astronomers Detect the First True Sugar in Interstellar Space
The discovery hints that life’s ingredients may form before planets exist.
SkyFall
NASA's SkyFall mission to Mars, building on the success of the Ingenuity helicopter, will send a trio of aircraft to survey the Red Planet, uncover clues about its climate history, scout areas inaccessible to rovers, and prepare for human explorers.
Utah Helicopter Flights Test NASA’s DAVINCI Mission to Venus
To prepare their spacecraft for Venus, NASA's DAVINCI scientists traveled to the most Venus-like place on Earth.
Get a sneak peek at the St. Louis Science Center’s upgraded planetarium before it opens Saturday
The upgrades include a Chiron star projector and a Digistar projection system, which will make the hybrid planetarium one of the largest and most advanced in the United States.
Letter to the Editor: A give-away contract with Another Planet Entertainment
The contracts proposed, between the San Francisco Recreation and Park Dept. and APE fall short of the industry standard. The APE contracts are not typical for a venue this size, potentially costing…
NASA's Perseverance just completed a marathon on Mars
NASA's Perseverance rover has reached an impressive new milestone on Mars, completing the equivalent of a full marathon by driving 26.2 miles (42.195 kilometers) across the Red Planet. It accomplished the feat in just five years and four months, reaching the distance on its 1,890th Martian day, less than half the time it took the previous record holder, NASA's Opportunity rover.
Battery-like device pulls CO₂ from air using electricity and saltwater chemistry
Engineers have developed a new way to pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere using a process similar to charging and discharging a battery—an advance that could help address the planet's excess ...
Anthropic’s Claude Science app is coming for Kendall Square
Few places on the planet have more at stake in AI’s transformation and disruption of life sciences than the Massachusetts biomedical ecosystem.
Anthropic's Claude Science could disrupt Kendall Square and biopharma
Few places on the planet have more at stake in AI’s transformation and disruption of life sciences than the Massachusetts biomedical ecosystem.
Japanese Astronomical Society ex-president Shigeru Ida joins China’s Westlake
Top planetary scientist will lead young university’s new astronomy department after decades shaping human understanding of the universe.
Off Brazil, scientists discover 31 new midwater species, including a gossamer worm and creepy fish
The deep ocean can feel more like science fiction than part of our own planet.
A single rare meteorite has revealed the chemical fingerprint of a Moon-sized world that once orbited the young Sun before being destroyed in a catastrophic collision — a lost planet science never knew existed until it landed as a rock
A one-pound rock found in the Sahara in 2019 has become evidence for something much larger than itself: a vanished planetary body from the first years of the
We get humans to Mars. What then? Here's what we'll really do on the Red Planet – and why it could solve the greatest mystery in science | BBC Sky at Night Magazine
If humans get to Mars, what will we do there? The dangers of getting humans to the Red Planet and the science we'll do once we get there.
Scientists identify nearby 'super-Earth' as promising candidate in search for alien life
NASA plans to launch the Habitable Worlds Observatory in the 2040s, a mission whose goal is “to image Earth-like planets around other sun-like stars,” according to NASA’s website.
This Star Just Ate a Planet, and It’s Not Done Yet
A star 1,300 light-years away appears to have just consumed one world and is gearing up for seconds.
Microsoft Patches RoguePlanet Defender Flaw That Can Grant SYSTEM Privileges
Microsoft Patches RoguePlanet Defender Flaw That Can Grant SYSTEM Privileges | Read more hacking news on The Hacker News cybersecurity news website and learn how to protect against cyberattacks and software vulnerabilities.
Learn indigo dyeing at Siren Song Fleece Works
Experience the magic of indigo! We will use some basic tie dye wraps to prepare a t-shirt to dip into the best natural blue dye on the planet
Greenland is being swarmed by autonomous drones and underwater robots as scientists race to answer one question: How close is Earth to a climate tipping point?
Self-driving drones, robotic boats, and underwater vessels will be sent to Greenland to find the answer to one of the most important questions in the realm of climate science: how far are we from crossing the climate tipping point on our planet? In this expedition, scientists hope to collect data from some of the world's most difficult glaciers, improve sea-level projections and assess whether major ocean circulation systems are changing irreversibly.
Another Planet Entertainment Contract Extension Before Board of Supes
A resolution to extend APE’s contract with the Recreation & Parks Department for three more years, with an option of extending it out further to 2035, was approved by the Budget and Appropriat…
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health
Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting
NASA’s New Horizons Spacecraft Wakes from Hibernation in Good Health
Following its longest hibernation period ever of nearly a year, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft has emerged in good health and is ready to begin transmitting