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The Calabash clash
The Calabash Nebula, pictured here — which has the technical name OH 231.8+04.2 — is a spectacular example of the death of a low-mass star like the Sun. This image taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope shows the star…
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Polar bears leave thousands of tons of food scraps for other species
Polar bears are picky eaters. And that’s great news for other hungry Arctic critters. In one year, a polar bear can leave roughly 300 kilograms (660 pounds) of scraps behind on which other animals can dine. Altogether, that comes to…
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Stellar Jet
Webb’s image of the enormous stellar jet in Sh2-284 provides evidence that protostellar jets scale with the mass of their parent stars—the more massive the stellar engine driving the plasma, the larger the resulting jet.
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Global coral die-offs signal Earth’s first climate tipping point
Earth has entered a grim new climate reality. The planet has officially passed its first climate tipping point. That’s a point where the effects of many smaller changes cause a sudden big change in Earth’s climate. It’s like that proverbial…
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NASA Astronaut Jonny Kim Returns to Earth
The Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft is seen as it lands in a remote area near the town of Zhezkazgan, Kazakhstan with Expedition 73 NASA astronaut Jonny Kim, and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Alexey Zubritsky aboard, Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2025.
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Here’s how to levitate something without magic
With a simple swish-and-flick of his wand, Ron Weasley yanks a troll’s club high above its head in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Through graceful martial arts moves, element benders in TV’s Avatar series launch boulders and waves of…
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Sprites Over Château de Beynac
A flash of lightning, and then—something else. High above a storm, a crimson figure blinks in and out of existence. If you see it, you are a lucky witness of a sprite, one of the least-understood electrical phenomena in Earth’s…
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Let’s learn about lab-grown meat
If you eat meat, you may have enjoyed gobbling up turkey on Thanksgiving. If you’re a vegetarian, you might have gone for Tofurky. (That tofu-based dish has been made to look and taste like the traditional holiday bird.) But one…
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XRISM Finds Chlorine, Potassium in Cas A
This composite image of the Cassiopeia A (or Cas A) supernova remnant, released Jan. 8, 2024, contains X-rays from Chandra (blue), infrared data from Webb (red, green, blue), and optical data from Hubble (red and white). A study by the…
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Scientists Say: Exponent
Exponent (noun, “EX-poh-nent”) An exponent is a number that tells you how many times to multiply a number by itself. In math, an exponent appears as a superscript after another number: 23 = x In this equation, 3 is the…
