Category: 7. Science

As ice caps melt, researchers warn that dormant volcanoes could erupt — and the ripple effects could hit closer to home than you think.

What’s happening?

Scientists say melting glaciers might do more than raise sea levels — they could also stir sleeping giants beneath the Earth’s surface, according to Inside Climate News.

At a recent science conference in Prague, researchers presented findings showing that shrinking glaciers can trigger volcanic eruptions. A team supported by the National Science Foundation analyzed six volcanoes in the Chilean Andes and found that, thousands of years ago, volcanoes became more active as the last ice age ended. The reason? Less weight holding down the magma.

“When you take the load off, it’s just like opening a Coca-Cola bottle or a champagne bottle,” said Brad Singer, a geologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, per ICN.

This shift doesn’t just apply to the Andes — scientists warn that as ice sheets continue to retreat in places like Alaska, Iceland, and Antarctica, once-quiet volcanoes could come roaring back to life.

Why are these findings concerning?

Volcanic eruptions aren’t just dramatic — they can be dangerous and far-reaching. Ash can ground planes, contaminate water, and choke crops. If one erupts during another extreme event — such as a heat wave, wildfire, or severe storm — it could overwhelm already strained systems.

Watch now: Giant snails invading New York City?

That’s not all that melting ice is changing. Higher tides are worsening flooding during storms, and shifting temperatures are expanding the range of mosquitoes that spread disease. While extreme weather events aren’t new, scientists have found that human activity is making many of them more intense — almost like putting extreme weather on steroids.

What’s being done about it?

Scientists are working on better ways to monitor volcanoes and spot warning signs earlier, but preparation doesn’t stop with research.

Cities are making changes on the ground — from planting more trees to cool neighborhoods, to updating infrastructure and emergency plans. And plenty of groups are stepping up in creative ways. Re:wild is protecting wild spaces that absorb carbon, and Trashie is helping people recycle everything from old sneakers to worn-out clothes instead of sending them to landfills.

You, too, can make a difference by exploring critical climate issues. Cutting back on food waste, switching to reusable products, and supporting clean transportation are all great ways to make a difference at home.

Join our free newsletter for good news and useful tips, and don’t miss this cool list of easy ways to help yourself while helping the planet.

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur that might have chirped like a bird, a finding that suggests the evolutionary origins of birdsong may be far more ancient than we previously thought.

In a paper published last week in the journal PeerJ, an international team of researchers describes a 163-million-year-old fossil found in northeastern China’s Hebei Province. The fossil dinosaur, which they’ve dubbed Pulaosaurus qinglong, measures just 28 inches (72 centimeters) and is largely complete, giving researchers an unusually detailed look at its anatomy, including its surprisingly birdlike throat.

“Even when you have a dinosaur skeleton preserved, you don’t always have these isolated bones preserved with other skull elements,” Xing Xu, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and an author of the paper, told The New York Times. “They’re very thin bones, very delicate and hard to preserve.”

In vertebrates, the vocal organs protect the airway and can produce sounds, including basic noises like hisses, groans, and grunts. In most living reptiles, these structures are made of cartilage and are relatively simple. Birds, however, have delicate, bony, flexible vocal organs that can make more complicated and diverse sounds.

Pulaosuarus’ throat seems somewhere between the two. Its vocal structures appear to be similar to that of another dinosaur, Pinacosaurus, a kind of ankylosaur with a large, bony larynx that may have been flexible enough to produce birdlike chirps and tweets, the researchers told the Times.

The researchers believe that Pulaosaurus lived during the late Jurassic period and belonged to the same group of creatures that would later give rise to “duck-billed” dinosaurs like hadrosaurs. But Pulaosaurus and Pinacosaurus are separated by millions of years of evolution, and neither belong to the group of dinosaurs that eventually produced birds. While it’s possible they developed their vocal features independently, the presence of similar structures in such distinct species indicates that dinosaurs’ ancient ancestors may have been pretty chirpy.

That means the origins of birdsong could lie in creatures that lived more than 230 million years ago, but it remains a mystery as to how or when modern birds’ voice box, called the syrinx, evolved—or if any dinosaur shared their incredible vocal prowess.

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QUICK FACTS

What it is: A potential planet around the star HD 135344B

Where it is: 440 light-years away, in the constellation Lupus

When it was shared: July 21, 2025

Deep within a swirling disk of gas and dust around the star HD 135344B, a young planet appears to be sculpting intricate spiral arms around its stellar host. It is the first time a planet has been found embedded inside a dust spiral around a star, actively shaping its environment.

The discovery is further proof that the building blocks of planets emerge from protoplanetary disks — giant, doughnut-shaped disks of gas and dust that circle young stars, according to NASA.

These dense, rotating clouds of material around young stars have been seen to feature rings and spirals suspected to be caused by the presence of baby planets, but this is the first direct evidence. In fact, the sculpted protoplanetary disk around the host star, HD 135344B, had been seen before by astronomers using the SPHERE (Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research) instrument on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

However, by using a new instrument called the Enhanced Resolution Imager and Spectrograph (ERIS), scientists finally discovered a planetary candidate. The planet is nestled at the base of one spiral arm — exactly where models predicted a planet would be needed to generate such a feature — and is thought to be twice the size of Jupiter. It’s about as far from its host star as Neptune is from the sun, or about 30 times the distance from Earth to the sun.

“What makes this detection potentially a turning point is that, unlike many previous observations, we are able to directly detect the signal of the protoplanet, which is still highly embedded in the disc,” Francesco Maio, a doctoral researcher at the University of Florence and lead author of a study describing the discovery, said in a statement.

Related: 32 alien planets that really exist

The existence of many exoplanets — planets that orbit a star other than the sun — is inferred from other information, such as the dip in a star’s brightness that is assumed to be caused by a planet. Observing the planet’s own light — reflected light from its host star — gives the proto-planet’s discoverers a much higher level of confidence in its existence.

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“We will never witness the formation of Earth, but here, around a young star 440 light-years away, we may be watching a planet come into existence in real time,” Maio said.

ERIS had a similarly decisive role in another recent discovery. Using ERIS, astronomers found an object — possibly a brown dwarf, an object halfway between a giant planet and a small star — in the protoplanetary disk around the young star V960 Mon, located 5,000 light-years away, in the constellation Monoceros.

For more sublime space images, check out our Space Photo of the Week archives.

Topline

Summer’s “shooting stars” season gets underway this week with the peaks of three meteor showers. The most famous meteor shower of all, the Perseids, will peak on Aug. 12-13, but a badly timed full moon makes this week the best time to see its shooting stars.

Key Facts

What To Know About The Perseid Meteor Shower In 2025

The Perseid meteor shower is already active, having begun on July 17 and is expected to continue until Aug. 23. On the peak night, around 50-75 meteors per hour are visible, but in 2025, that number will be significantly reduced, with only the very brightest of its shooting stars visible. That’s because Aug. 9 will see the rise of a full sturgeon moon, which will remain bright and dominant in the night sky on Aug. 12-13, rising just as the peak of the Perseids gets underway. It will remain in the sky for the rest of the night.

When To See The Perseid Meteor Shower In 2025

There are two periods to watch the skies in 2025 if you want to see shooting stars from the Perseid meteor shower. The first is right now before the moon reaches its first quarter phase on Aug. 1. The second is Aug. 15, when the moon will rise around midnight and a little later on subsequent nights.

How To Watch A Meteor Shower

According to NASA, the best way to watch a meteor shower is to get out of the city to the darkest location you can, such as a Dark Sky Place. However, it’s wise to check the weather forecast in advance because a clear sky is imperative. Observe somewhere with a clear view of as much of the night sky as possible, with extra layers to keep warm, as well as bug spray, snacks and drinks. Be patient, take a break every 30 minutes and avoid looking at a smartphone whose white light will kill your night vision.

The Next Major Meteor Shower

After the Perseids come to an end on Aug. 23, the next major meteor shower will be the Orionids. Active from Oct. 2 to Nov. 12, it will peak overnight on Oct. 22-23, one day after October’s new moon. That will be perfectly dark skies, making many of the Orionids’ predicted 10-20 shooting stars per hour during the peak visible to observers away from light pollution. The Orionid meteor shower is one of two annual meteor showers caused by Halley’s Comet, the most famous and one of the largest comets known. The other is the Eta Aquariids meteor shower, which next peaks on May 5-6, 2026.

Further Reading

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Heads up, stargazers! The waxing crescent moon will appear on the left shoulder of Mars in the hours following sunset on July 28 — close enough for both to fit easily in the view of a pair of 10×50 binoculars.

The crescent moon will be visible 20 degrees above the western horizon at sunset on July 28, with Mars appearing as a bright point of light roughly four degrees to its upper right. Both Mars and the stars of the nearby constellation Virgo will grow more prominent as the glow of the setting sun gives way to the coming night.

Deep within a swirling disk of gas and dust around the star HD 135344B, a young planet appears to be sculpting intricate spiral arms around its stellar host. It is the first time a planet has been found embedded inside a dust spiral around a star, actively shaping its environment.

The discovery is further proof that the building blocks of planets emerge from protoplanetary disks — giant, doughnut-shaped disks of gas and dust that circle young stars, according to NASA.

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By now, I have a pretty reliable method for gauging that the scientific study of the new interstellar object 3I/ATLAS went viral. When the carpenter that fixes the porch at my home or the mechanic that changes the oil in my wife’s car, both ask my wife with great interest for the latest news about my related scientific papers without me knowing them, I know that 3I/ATLAS went viral!

It is not a trivial matter to get the public interested in the latest scientific research. In recent decades, academia distanced itself from the public. Scientific advances are routinely communicated in press conferences where scientists speak to reporters like teachers in a classroom, encouraging questions but resisting debates. Funding is allocated to research directions within echo chambers that are detached from public questioning.

The problem with this self-defeating approach is that science is fundamentally work in progress, a learning experience where a sense of humility and raw-curiosity require to collect more data in the face of anomalies. Yes, mainstream scientists could be wrong irrespective of how confident they are about hypotheses. They can invest billions of dollars in searching for weakly-interacting massive particles as dark matter and not find what they are looking for, despite the confidence expressed in press conferences about the latest experiments and the compliments expressed in prize ceremonies that rewarded those who proposed these ideas without experimental evidence.

At the same time, when the possibility that interstellar objects might be technological in origin is proposed based on observed anomalies — knowing that humanity launched interstellar probes over the past half century, comet “experts” are quick to ridicule it. Regarding 3I/ATLAS, the Oxford astronomer Chris Lintott was quoted last week as saying: “Any suggestion that it’s artificial is nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object.” Lintott is the editor of the scientific journal Research Notes of the American Astronomical Society, and in that capacity — he asked me to remove any reference to the possibility that 3I/ATLAS might be artificial before accepting my paper for publication there (accessible here).

Is it really an insult to consider a hypothesis in the context of figuring out anomalies regarding the nature of 3I/ATLAS? If the nature of dark matter happens to be a primordial black hole but for four decades mainstream astronomers argued that it is likely a weakly-interacting-massive-particle, should this suggestion be considered as “nonsense on stilts, and is an insult to the exciting work going on to understand this object”?

In retrospect, I am grateful for Lintott’s feedback, which convinced me to co-author a full paper with the title: “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” (accessible here). The paper stated explicitly: “We strongly emphasize that this paper is largely a pedagogical exercise, with interesting discoveries and strange serendipities, worthy of a record in the scientific literature. By far the most likely outcome will be that 3I/ATLAS is a completely natural interstellar object, probably a comet, and the authors await the astronomical data to support this likely origin.” This paper is currently under peer review, and I can only imagine the pressure that will be applied by mainstream reviewers on the editors to decline its publication.

One of the main reasons I co-authored this second paper is to encourage observers to collect as much data as possible in order to prove this hypothesis wrong. If instead of putting Galileo Galilei in house arrest, the Vatican would have been eager to look through telescopes and prove him wrong, then the clergy would have corrected course long before the Vatican’s official 1992 statement that Galileo was right.

Why is there so much toxicity within academia towards ideas that a carpenter and an auto mechanic find so exciting? After all, the work of science is to consider all possibilities until the evidence rules out all but one interpretation. Why is it far more reasonable to consider the search for anomalous radio signals as a techno-signature while treating the search for an alien artifact among the population of interstellar objects as “nonsense on stilts”? This choice is a matter of taste, not substantive reasoning.

My main concern is about the young generation of fledgling scientists who witness this behavior and are deterred from innovating out of fear that such a choice would risk their job prospects. There is a huge invisible damage to innovation in science that results from the public ridicule towards “out-of-the-box” thinking. Of course, keeping the herd in a tight configuration might be the actual reason for the aggressive behavior of the herders towards individuals who deviate from the beaten path. This practice is common in religious cults, but science is supposed to be guided by evidence and not authority.

Committees of mainstream scientists who decide how to allocate federal funds often resist investments in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence by arguing that it is too risky and might result in wasting taxpayers’ money. But if these reviewers were humble enough to ask the taxpayers what they wish to spend their tax money on, they would find the search for extraterrestrial intelligence to be at the top of the priority list. Gatekeeping and ridicule are not the landscape I wished for when I started my scientific career 45 years ago, around the time when Chris Lintott was born.

The ridicule of scientific hypotheses before gathering conclusive evidence is anti-scientific. The public lost confidence in mainstream scientists who ridiculed the hypothesis that COVID-19 originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology during serial passage or gain-of-function research on SARS-related viruses. This ridicule was unwarranted, as admitted in a recent paper accessible here. This paper concludes with the following statement:

“Science begins with questions and derives its answers through evidence.”

Amen. I rest my case.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.

One of the most enduring stereotypes about domestic cats is that they absolutely despise getting wet. From frantically scrambling out of the bathtub to recoiling at the mist from a spray bottle, cats and water always seem to be at odds. And while some felines might not mind a swim — certain breeds, including Turkish Vans and Maine coons tend to adore the water — many cat owners know that this stereotype still rings true for their fur babies.

But why do cats hate water so much?

The research team reports that drying areas on land are expanding at a rate roughly twice the size of California every year. And, the rate at which dry areas are getting drier now outpaces the rate at which wet areas are getting wetter, reversing long-standing hydrological patterns.

The negative implications of this for available freshwater are staggering. 75% of the world’s population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater for the past 22 years. According to the United Nations, the world’s population is expected to continue to grow for the next 50 to 60 years — at the same time the availability of freshwater is dramatically shrinking.

The researchers identified the type of water loss on land, and for the first time, found that 68% came from groundwater alone — contributing more to sea level rise than the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets combined.

“These findings send perhaps the most alarming message yet about the impact of climate change on our water resources,” said Jay Famiglietti, the study’s principal investigator and a Global Futures Professor with the ASU School of Sustainability. “Continents are drying, freshwater availability is shrinking, and sea level rise is accelerating. The consequences of continued groundwater overuse could undermine food and water security for billions of people around the world. This is an ‘all-hands-on-deck’ moment — we need immediate action on global water security.”

The researchers evaluated more than two decades of data from the US-German Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE-Follow On (GRACE-FO) missions, looking at how and why terrestrial water storage has changed since 2002. Terrestrial water storage includes all of Earth’s surface and vegetation water, soil moisture, ice, snow, and groundwater stored on land.

“It is striking how much non-renewable water we are losing,” said Hrishikesh A. Chandanpurkar, lead author of the study and a research scientist for ASU. “Glaciers and deep groundwater are sort of ancient trust funds. Instead of using them only in times of need such as a prolonged drought, we are taking them for granted. Also, we are not trying to replenish the groundwater systems during wet years and thus edging towards an imminent freshwater bankruptcy.”

Tipping point and worsening continental drying

The study identified what seems to be a tipping point around 2014-15 during a time considered “mega El-Niño” years. Climate extremes began accelerating and in response, groundwater use increased and continental drying exceeded the rates of glacier and ice sheet melting.

Additionally, the study revealed a previously unreported oscillation where after 2014, drying regions flipped from being located mostly in the southern hemisphere to mostly in the north, and vice versa for wet regions.

One of the key drivers contributing to continental drying is the increasing extremes of drought in the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, for example, in Europe. Additionally, in Canada and Russia, snow, ice, and permafrost melting increased over the last decade, and the continued depletion of groundwater globally is a major factor.

In a previous study, members of the team studied terrestrial water storage from satellite data spanning 2002 — 2016. In the new study, the team looked at more than 20 years of data and discovered a critical, major development in continental drying. Several regional drying patterns and previously identified localized ‘hotspots’ for terrestrial water storage loss are now interconnected — forming the four continental-scale mega drying regions.

These include:

• Southwestern North America and Central America: this region includes major food-producing regions across the American Southwest, along with major desert cities such as Phoenix, Tucson, Las Vegas, and major metropolitan areas such as Los Angeles and Mexico City.

• Alaska and Northern Canada: this region includes melting alpine glaciers in Alaska and British Columbia, snow and permafrost melting across the Canadian high latitudes, and drying in major agricultural regions such as British Columbia and Saskatchewan

• Northern Russia: this region is experiencing major snow and permafrost melting across the high latitudes

• Middle East-North Africa (MENA) Pan-Eurasia: this region includes major desert cities including Dubai, Casablanca, Cairo, Baghdad and Tehran; major food producing regions including Ukraine, northwest India, and China’s North China Plain region; the shrinking Caspian and Aral Seas; and major cities such as Barcelona, Paris, Berlin, Dhaka and Beijing.

In fact, the study showed that since 2002, only the tropics have continued to get wetter on average by latitude, something not predicted by IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) climate models — sophisticated computer programs used to project future climate scenarios. Continuous records are critical in understanding the long-term changes in the water cycle.

“This study really shows how important it is to have continuous observations of a variable such as terrestrial water storage,” said Chandanpurkar. “GRACE records are really getting to the length where we are able to robustly see long-term trends from climate variability. More in-situ observations and data sharing would further support in making this separation and inform water management.”

A Planetary Wake-Up Call

The unprecedented scale of continental drying threatens agriculture and food security, biodiversity, freshwater supplies and global stability. The current study highlights the need for ongoing research at scale to inform policymakers and communities about worsening water challenges and opportunities to create meaningful change.

“This research matters. It clearly shows that we urgently need new policies and groundwater management strategies on a global scale,” said Famiglietti, who is also with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory and a former Senior Water Scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “While efforts to mitigate climate change are facing challenges, we can address continental drying by implementing new policies around regional and international groundwater sustainability. In turn, this will slow the rate of sea level rise and help preserve water for future generations.”

The study calls for immediate action to slow and reverse groundwater depletion, protect remaining freshwater resources, and adapt to the growing risk of water scarcity and coastal flooding. The research team goes on to say that strategic water management, international cooperation, and sustainable policies are essential to preserving water for future generations and mitigating further damage to planetary systems.

The research will also support an upcoming World Bank Group flagship report that will delve deeper into these findings, including the human and economic implications of continental drying, and present actionable solutions for countries to address the growing freshwater crisis.

About the Study

The findings are based on over 22 years of terrestrial water storage data from US-German GRACE and GRACE-FO satellite missions. The full report details the scientific analyses and regional breakdowns of the drying trends, which have proven robust and persistent despite climate variability.

The research team includes scientists from Arizona State University; Hrishikesh A. Chandanpurkar, FLAME University; John T. Reager and David N. Wiese, JPL; Kaushik Gopalan and Yoshihide Wada, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology; Kauru Kakinuma, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology; and Fan Zhang, The World Bank.

This research was funded by the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at Arizona State University, the GRACE Follow-On Science Team, and World Bank Global Water Monitoring.

The new substance repels both water and grease about as well as standard non-stick coatings — but it contains much lower amounts of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a family of chemicals that have raised environmental and health concerns.

“The research community has been trying to develop safer alternatives to PFAS for a long time,” says Professor Kevin Golovin, who heads the Durable Repellent Engineered Advanced Materials (DREAM) Laboratory at U of T Engineering.

“The challenge is that while it’s easy to create a substance that will repel water, it’s hard to make one that will also repel oil and grease to the same degree. Scientists had hit an upper limit to the performance of these alternative materials.”

Since its invention in the late 1930s, Teflon — also known as polytetrafluoroethylene or PTFE — has become famous for its ability to repel water, oil and grease alike. Teflon is part of a larger family of substances known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).

PFAS molecules are made of chains of carbon atoms, each of which is bonded to several fluorine atoms. The inertness of carbon-fluorine bonds is responsible for the non-stick properties of PFAS.

However, this chemical inertness also causes PFAS to resist the normal processes that would break down other organic molecules over time. For this reason, they are sometimes called ‘forever chemicals.’

In addition to their persistence, PFAS are known to accumulate in biological tissues, and their concentrations can become amplified as they travel up the food chain.

Various studies have linked exposure to high levels of PFAS to certain types of cancer, birth defects and other health problems, with the longer chain PFAS generally considered more harmful than the shorter ones.

Despite the risks, the lack of alternatives means that PFAS remain ubiquitous in consumer products: they are widely used not only in cookware, but also in rain-resistant fabrics, food packaging and even in makeup.

“The material we’ve been working with as an alternative to PFAS is called polydimethylsiloxane or PDMS,” says Golovin.

“PDMS is often sold under the name silicone, and depending on how it’s formulated, it can be very biocompatible — in fact it’s often used in devices that are meant to be implanted into the body. But until now, we couldn’t get PDMS to perform quite as well as PFAS.”

To overcome this problem, PhD student Samuel Au developed a new chemistry technique that the team is calling nanoscale fletching. The technique is described in a paper published in Nature Communications.

“Unlike typical silicone, we bond short chains of PDMS to a base material — you can think of them like bristles on a brush,” says Au.

“To improve their ability to repel oil, we have now added in the shortest possible PFAS molecule, consisting of a single carbon with three fluorines on it. We were able to bond about seven of those to the end of each PDMS bristle.

“If you were able to shrink down to the nanometer scale, it would look a bit like the feathers that you see around the back end of an arrow, where it notches to the bow. That’s called fletching, so this is nanoscale fletching.”

Au and the team coated their new material on a piece of fabric, then placed drops of various oils on it to see how well it could repel them. On a scale developed by the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists, the new coating achieved a grade of 6, placing it on par with many standard PFAS-based coatings.

“While we did use a PFAS molecule in this process, it is the shortest possible one and therefore does not bioaccumulate,” says Golovin.

“What we’ve seen in the literature, and even in the regulations, is that it’s the longest-chain PFAS that are getting banned first, with the shorter ones considered much less harmful. Our hybrid material provides the same performance as what had been achieved with long-chain PFAS, but with greatly reduced risk.”

Golovin says that the team is open to collaborating with manufacturers of non-stick coatings who might wish to scale up and commercialize the process. In the meantime, they will continue working on even more alternatives.

“The holy grail of this field would be a substance that outperforms Teflon, but with no PFAS at all,” says Golovin.

“We’re not quite there yet, but this is an important step in the right direction.”