environment
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Bioluminescence Is at Least Half a Billion Years Old
Bioluminescence, the eerie, beautiful phenomena that allows living things to glow, is way more ancient than previously thought, according to a team of researchers that recently studied the ability in octocorals. Octocorals are not closely related to corals, despite their name. They are a group of marine invertebrates that reside—and glow—in Earth’s oceans. But octocorals…
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Staggering Quantities of Valuable Metals Are Winding Up in the Garbage Bin
To build all of the solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicle batteries, and other technologies necessary to fight climate change, we’re going to need a lot more metals. Mining those metals from the Earth creates damage and pollution that threaten ecosystems and communities. But there’s another potential source of the copper, nickel, aluminum, and rare-earth…
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Yeah, That’s a Freakin’ Lava Lake on a Moon
Two recent flybys of Jupiter’s moon Io by NASA’s Juno spacecraft revealed a couple of stunning surprises: a remarkably steep mountain and islands in the middle of a burbling lava lake. The new findings were announced yesterday by Scott Bolton, the principal investigator of the Juno mission, at the European Geophysical Union’s General Assembly. “Io…
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How the Color Purple Could Lead Us to Alien Life
In a little more than 30 years, we went from knowing only of the planets in our star system to discovering over 5,000 distant worlds spread across the cosmos. So far, none have looked quite like Earth. If an Earth-like planet was orbiting another star, however, it may look different than our precious pale blue…