Plastic has been plagued with some bad press in the weeks leading up to Earth Day, which takes place Sunday, April 22, from a sperm whale that washed ashore in Spain with 64 pounds of plastic in its body to a 600,000 square mile area in the Pacific Ocean rife with trash. Both headlines drew […]
Science
Behind the Photo That Made People Think Earth Day Was Founded by a Convicted Killer
Ever since 20 million people took to American streets on April 22, 1970, over the lack of regulation of corporations’ pollution, Earth Day has been an annual chance to motivate citizens to do something good for the planet. The protests and the movement of which they were part helped lead to the creation that year […]
How the Real Pilots of Mercury 13 Made the Case for the U.S. to Send Women to Space
The iconic line has become so familiar that it might be hard to imagine it any other way: as the first man on the moon put it, his achievement was “one small step for man.” But what if the first human being on the lunar surface had been a woman? That’s a central question asked […]
Extreme Heatwaves Killed Half of the Great Barrier Reef’s Coral in Two Years, Study Says
Global warming’s rapid desiccation of the Great Barrier Reef has taken an even more substantial — and permanent— toll than previously understood, a new study has found. Nearly half of the coral in the northern, most pristine part of the reef system has died after two successive heat waves. Writing in the journal Nature on […]
NASA’s New Planet-Hunting Satellite Is on a Quest to Find Alien Worlds
(CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.) — NASA’s Tess spacecraft embarked Wednesday on a quest to find new worlds around neighboring stars that could support life. Tess rode a SpaceX Falcon rocket through the evening sky, aiming for an orbit stretching all the way to the moon. The satellite — the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, or Tess — […]