DART Showed How to Smash an Asteroid. So Where Did the Space Shrapnel Go?
Nearly one year ago, NASA flung the DART spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos at 14,000 miles per hour. It was the first test to see whether they could slightly deflect a space rock’s trajectory using a high-speed collision, a technique that could be used to protect Earth from future killer asteroids. It worked. But now […]
Turtles Carry Signs of Humanity’s Nuclear History in Their Shells
On a spring day in 1978, a fisherman caught a tiger shark in the lagoon surrounding Enewetak Atoll, part of the Marshall Islands in the north Pacific. That shark, along with the remains of a green sea turtle it had swallowed, wound up in a natural history museum. Today, scientists are realizing that this turtle […]
Hurricane Idalia Is About to Slam Florida With a Wall of Water
Early Tuesday morning, Tropical Storm Idalia strengthened into Hurricane Idalia, charting a course for Florida’s west coast and panhandle. Its maximum sustained winds have already reached nearly 100 miles per hour, and it’s expected to keep feeding on exceptionally warm ocean waters and intensifying before making landfall early Wednesday. It will pound Florida—including heavily populated […]
The Massive Campaign to Air-Drop Tiny Rabies Vaccines to Raccoons
State laws forbid transporting and relocating raccoons because of the rabies risk, but Chipman says it still happens all the time. Just this month, raccoons that were trapped and ear-tagged in Ontario, Canada, showed up in a nuisance wildlife control operator’s trap in Rhode Island. “How that raccoon got there, we don’t know,” he says. […]