Marina Koren, Atlantic
One evening last year, when his newborn daughter was small enough to hold with one arm, Ren Heller reached for a book to occupy his mind while he rocked her to sleep. Heller, an astrophysicist at the Max Planck Institutes in Gttingen, Germany, picked up Is Anyone Out There? The Scientific Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.
Diego Quinones, Conversation
There was a lot of excitement last year when the LIGO collaboration detected gravitational waves, which are ripples in the fabric of space itself. And it's no wonder it was one of the most important discoveries of the century. By measuring gravitational waves from intense astrophysical processes like merging black holes, the experiment opens up a completely new way of observing and understanding the universe.
Matt Williams, Universe Today
In January of 2016, astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin published the first evidence that there might be another planet in our Solar System. Known as Planet 9, this hypothetical body was estimated to be about 10 times as massive as Earth and to orbit that our Sun at an average distance of 700 AU. Since that time, multiple studies have been produced that either support or cast doubt on the existence of Planet 9.
Jeff Tollefson, Nature News
The numbers didn't add up. Even as Earth grew warmer and glaciers and ice sheets thawed, decades of satellite data seemed to show that the rate of sea-level rise was holding steady or even declining.Now, after puzzling over this discrepancy for years, scientists have identified its source: a problem with the calibration of a sensor on the first of several satellites launched to measure the height of the sea surface using radar.
Sid Perkins, Science News
An elephant should run faster than a horseat least in theory. That's because big creatures have more of the type of muscle cells used for acceleration. Yet midsized animals are the fastest on Earth, a trend that researchers have long struggled to explain.
Christie Wilcox, Discover
Scientists predict that in the next twenty years, the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in our atmosphere will rise from the roughly 404 ppm it is now to over 450 ppmand as a result, ecosystems worldwide will change. Many impacts will be particularly felt in our planet's oceans. As atmospheric CO2 levels rise, more of the gas dissolves into our seas, causing a chemical chain reaction which makes the water more acidic.