There are serious concerns over the fate of NASA’s Earth science programs, in light of planned policies being released by president-elect Donald Trump. The Trump campaign’s space policy advisor, Robert Smith Walker, has stated that they plan to “redirect NASA budgets towards deep space achievements rather than Earth-centric climate change spending.”
read more
The levels of carbon dioxide found in the atmosphere in modern times have been found to be nearly ten times higher than any other time since the extinction of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. The event that came the closest to today’s CO2 levels, the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), occurred 55.5 million years ago, where a spike in greenhouse gasses caused global temperatures to increase by 5–8 °C over what we’re experiencing today. While the existence and cause of the PETM is well established, the source of the massive amount of CO2 that caused the temperature spike has been a complete mystery to scientists.read more
Astronomers with the Pale Red Dot Project have announced the discovery of an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to Earth. The newfound planet, currently called "Proxima b", has the fortune of being 1.3 times the mass of the Earth, and orbits within the star’s Goldilocks Zone, meaning that it is just the right size and temperature to host liquid water, one of the requirements for life as we know it.
read more
Scientists have discovered a reliable way to extract renewable energy from ordinary seawater. The research team, from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Laboratory of Nanoscale Biology in Switzerland, employed a natural process called osmosis, where a fluid permeates through a membrane from one side to another.
read more