Raindrops have been caught breaking the speed limit. Using drizzle detectors, researchers discovered tiny raindrops falling more than 1.3 times as fast as terminal velocity, the speed at which air resistance cancels out gravitational pull.
A new comprehensive map of Earth’s seafloor reveals never-before-seen features hidden deep below the waves, including thousands of uncharted underwater mountains. The map, presented in the Oct. 3 Science, is the most accurate global seafloor map ever made and could provide new clues to how Earth’s surface got its shape.
California won’t see hoped-for relief from drought this winter, scientists say, because El Niño is likely to be weak or nonexistent.
A new simulation illustrates the explosiveness of the volcano that lurks beneath Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming.
The Sahara Desert may be millions of years older than scientists thought, researchers report in the Sept. 18 Nature. The team’s climate reconstruction suggests that the desert formed 7 million years ago as the ancient forerunner of the Mediterranean Sea shriveled.
Balmy surface temperatures, not an unstable underbelly, probably prompted the largest ice shelf collapse ever recorded, researchers report in the Sept. 12 Science.
Plate tectonics churns the icy exterior of Jupiter’s moon Europa, researchers report September 7 in Nature Geoscience. The finding marks the first evidence of plate tectonics elsewhere in the universe.
A twist on the sun is throwing solar scientists for a loop. For the first time, researchers have watched the sun’s magnetic field force plasma into a spring-shaped curl during a powerful solar eruption known as a coronal mass ejection, or CME.
For nearly a century Death Valley’s dancing rocks have amazed visitors and stumped scientists. Despite etching trails longer than football fields into the dried mud, no one had ever seen the stones move.
Exploiting the same quantum quirk that spawns Schrödinger’s undead cat in the famous thought experiment, a research team snapped a portrait of a cardboard cat without collecting any light bouncing off the two-dimensional kitty. This blind camera, comprising lasers and crystals, could help scientists illuminate microscopic worlds difficult to picture using existing techniques, the team reports in the Aug. 28 Nature.