Science

A huge sunspot on the far side of the sun is set to face Earth this weekend, potentially lashing our planet with a geomagnetic storm. The spot is so big it's changing the way the sun vibrates, according to spaceweather.com. If the dark spot hurls a blob of plasma at Earth, it could disrupt our magnetic field, affecting GPS and communication…

Is it Possible to Bring Back Extinct Animal Species? View a higher resolution version of this infographic. Humanity has been tinkering with natural life for thousands of years. We’ve become remarkably good at it, too—to date, we’ve modified bacteria to produce drugs, created crops…

NASA's ambitious Artemis 1 moon mission is go to return to the pad, one last time, ahead of launch.The Artemis 1 stack will make the roughly 4-mile (6.4 kilometers) journey from Kennedy Space Center's Vehicle Assembly Building to Launch Complex 39B on Aug. 18, NASA confirmed on Friday (Aug. 5). The rollout will keep Artemis 1 on track to launch…

Earlier this week, French physicist Etienne Klein seemed to post a photo of Proxima Centauri, the closest known star to our own, located some 4.2 light years away. The photo was gorgeous and quickly amassed thousands of likes. There was just one problem: the photo was actually just a bit of chorizo. As translated by IGN, Klein originally posted…

Precise measurements show that Earth’s rotation has been mysteriously slowing down since 2020, making the day longer.Precise astronomical observations, combined with atomic clocks, have revealed that the length of a day is suddenly getting longer. Scientists don’t know why.This has critical impacts not just on our timekeeping, but also on things…

The blast was astonishing.When the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano erupted on Jan. 15, it sent shock waves around the planet. The imagery awed earth scientists. And now, researchers have found the eruption pumped enough water vapor into the atmosphere to fill a whopping 58,000 swimming pools — an amount never before observed.The water reached…