Do any habitable worlds exist in the closest stellar system to our own, Alpha Centauri? For years scientists have struggled to answer this question, unsuccessfully seeking to pierce the overpowering glare of the two sunlike stars, Alpha Centauri A and B, to see signs of orbiting planets (a third member […]
Day: November 19, 2021
Great Apes’ Biggest Threat Is Human Activity, Not Habitat Loss
When ecologist Hjalmar Kühl first visited the Republic of Congo in 2003, deep in the forest, he met chimpanzees whose curiosity gave away that they had never seen a human before. “You’d try to move away, and they’d come closer,” he says. “They’d just sit there watching us.” Today it’s […]
Mystery of Doomed Sardine Migration Is Finally Solved
As winter arrives in South Africa, anticipation begins to build for one of the planet’s largest and most spectacular migrations: the KwaZulu-Natal sardine run. In the waters off the southern tip of Africa, hundreds of millions of the slender, silvery fish coalesce into massive shoals and begin to travel hundreds […]
NASA’s DART Mission Could Help Cancel an Asteroid Apocalypse
Back when Andy Rivkin was in college, he had a few friends in medical school. “I was like, oh man, I don’t want do anything that has too much responsibility,” he says. Instead, he looked to the stars. “Astronomy seemed pretty safe.” And, for a while, it was. Rather than […]
Lost Women of Science, Episode 3: The Case of the Missing Portrait
From the COVID vaccine to pulsars to computer programming, women are at the source of many scientific discoveries, inventions and innovations that shape our lives. But in the stories we’ve come to accept about those breakthroughs, women are too often left out. Each season at Lost Women of Science, we’ll […]