Science

Why do we feel stuck in our efforts to solve the great sustainability crises of the 21st century? Between the dire need to successfully mitigate climate change while making progress on human-focused Sustainable Development Goals, the challenges of the Anthropocene — the era in which we now live — can appear insurmountable.

Yet, despite the central role of human actions in creating sustainability solutions, there has been no high-level, comprehensive depiction of what the global human population is doing in precise, numerical terms.

On Oct. 6, news broke that 23andMe, the Google-owned company that collects genetic material from thousands of people for ancestry and genetic predisposition tests, had a massive data breach.

But as it turns out, the company’s servers were not hacked. Rather, hackers targeted hundreds of individual user accounts — allegedly those that had weak or repeated passwords. After gaining access to the accounts, hackers could leverage the “DNA relatives matches” function of 23andMe to get information about thousands of people who didn’t use the service.

At first glance, the spotted lanternfly looks like an elegant butterfly, speckled with black spots on white wings with a splash of bright red.

But the insect native to parts of Asia (Lycorma delicatula) is attacking plants and trees in the United States, and officials are moving quickly to try to contain its spread.

Reports this week suggest a near-collision between an Australian satellite and a suspected Chinese military satellite.

Meanwhile, earlier this month, the US government issued the first ever space junk fine. The Federal Communications Commission handed a US$150,000 penalty to the DISH Network, a publicly traded company providing satellite TV services.

Every day and night, hundreds of thousands of intense, brief flashes of radiation suddenly flicker on and then off all across the sky. These “fast radio bursts” are invisible to the naked eye, but to a radio telescope many almost outshine everything else in the sky for a few thousandths of a second.

Since the first such burst was spotted in 2006, we have found that nearly all of them come from distant galaxies. Most bursts pass unnoticed, occurring outside the field of view of radio telescopes, and never occur again.

They're one of the most endangered mammals in the world, and a species you may never have even heard of: North Atlantic right whales.

American conservationists are hoping a proposed federal rule change to expand speed restrictions for vessels along the US East Coast will save the marine giants, which number fewer than 350, from extinction.

The lead author of a new analysis of flame retardant pollution said she was "blown away" by the amount of chemicals that have seeped into the environment, contaminating more than 100 wildlife species across every continent on Earth—even as other studies have found that ubiquitous anti-flame products have been found to be ineffective in most applications.

"Flame retardants don't actually make TV enclosures and car interiors more fire-safe, but they can harm people and animals," said Lydia Jahl, a scientist at the Green Science Policy Institute (GSPI), which published the study on Thursday. "Though these product flammability standards may seem protective at first glance, many cause widespread and lasting harm for no real benefit."

Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskidsus@theconversation.com.

One way physicists seek clues to unravel the mysteries of the universe is by smashing matter together and inspecting the debris. But these types of destructive experiments, while incredibly informative, have limits.

We are two scientists who study nuclear and particle physics using CERN’s Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland. Working with an international group of nuclear and particle physicists, our team realized that hidden in the data from previous studies was a remarkable and innovative experiment.