Here are 5 exoplanet mysteries the James Webb telescope could help solve Finding planets around other stars used to be extremely difficult. In fact, scientists found the first black hole and countless distant galaxies before spotting any worlds beyond our solar system. The first exoplanet wasn’t discovered until 1992. Now, astronomers have identified well more than 5,000 distant worlds. But we…
Extreme Weather Tests the Durability of Solar and Wind Power As category four Hurricane Ian swept across the Caribbean into south west Florida on 28 September 2022, knocking out Cuba’s electricity grid along the way, hundreds of thousands of homes were hit by flooding and power loss. In contrast, the solar-powered community of Babcock Ranch 24 miles to the north of coastal…
Why We Know Nothing about Dark Matter and Dark Energy Welcome to the era of precision cosmology…where we’ve managed to very precisely measure everything we don’t know about the universe. Cosmology is the study of the universe. As in, the whole entire universe as a single physical object. Cosmologists try to understand the origins, history, evolution, contents,…
Blind Dogs Can Still Play Fetch. A Newfound Nose-to-Brain Connection Explains Why. As any dog owner knows, dogs love their nose. There are more than 300 million scent receptors in a dog’s snout, which is why dogs are used to sniff out drugs, bombs, firearms, and even diseases. Now newfound research shows there’s a more powerful connection between…
Why You Can’t Escape a Mosquito Mosquitoes are responsible for more human deaths than any other creature. These bloodsuckers can transmit disease-causing viruses like Zika, dengue, and malaria. In an effort to deter these pests, scientists have tried to block mosquitoes’ ability to smell. The idea was if you can block a mosquito from detecting…
Meet LUCA, the 4.2 billion-year-old cell that’s the ancestor of all life on Earth today Everything alive today descends from a cell that lived 4.2 billion years ago, just a few hundred million years after Earth formed, new research suggests. That last universal common ancestor, which biologists affectionately nicknamed LUCA, wasn’t so different from fairly…
