Climate 101 is a Mashable series that answers provoking and salient questions about Earth’s warming climate.   It's speeding up. Antarctica's Pine Island Glacier, already the biggest source of sea level rise from the ice-clad continent, has started purging more ice than ever observed (from it) into the ocean.  In research recently published in the journal Science Advances, glacier experts found Pine Island — which holds some 180 trillion tons of ice — lost big chunks of ice into the sea over the past few years (2017-2020), and the glacier picked up its pace. This means Pine Island c ..read more

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a brilliant image of spiral galaxy NGC 3254, which has a particularly luminescent and active core emitting as much energy as the rest of the galaxy combined. NGC 3254 is classified as a Seyfert galaxy. Seyfert galaxies are defined by their extremely active centers. Why are they so active? They each have a supermassive black hole in them. The intense gravitational pull of supermassive black holes whip gases, dusts, stars, planetary bodies, and other material into a frenzy of high-speed collisions as they're yanked inward. As all that space stuff rips apart ..read more

A newly discovered species of gigantic rhino that used to roam Asia around 25 million years ago was detailed by scientists in a paper published in Nature Thursday. With a name that just rolls right off the tongue, the newly minted Paraceratherium linxiaense was pieced together from a well-preserved skull and a few vertebrae found in the Gansu province of north-central China, in the Linxia Basin.  Other, more complete skeletons of members of the Paraceratherium genus revealed that these hornless, giant rhinos stood at about 16 feet tall and 26 feet long, and weighed 22 tons, making them t ..read more

Space travel has environmental costs. For research, it might be worth it. To send Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and other wealthy tourists into orbit? That’s debatable. Companies including SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Space Adventures want to make space tourism more common. And people are interested.  Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa spent an undisclosed sum of money to SpaceX in 2018 for a private trip around the moon and back. The trip is penciled in for 2023, although the Starship rocket still needs to prove it can reliably take off and land without exploding. This month, someone pa ..read more

A satellite made of wood sounds like a concept ripped from the pages of Leonardo da Vinci's sketchbooks. But Finnish company Arctic Astronautics wants to launch one into space by the end of 2021.  The WISA Woodsat, a microsatellite constructed out of plywood, was hoisted via weather balloon Saturday almost 20 miles above Earth. It was in the stratosphere to test the plywood construction in space-like conditions.   It was armed with a selfie stick to document its journey and a sensor package supplied by the European Space Agency. A physically unimposing 4-inch cube, Woodsat's "space ..read more

Records will break. A mid-June heat wave, lasting through the week's end, is baking much of the Western U.S. A hot weather pattern amplified by a climate change-exacerbated drying trend has fueled the intense heat. Temperatures are expected to reach around 20 degrees Fahrenheit above average in some regions. "This is an exceptional heat wave," said Jeff Weber, a research meteorologist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, an organization that facilitates and performs earth science. "There is some possibility for all-time record heat coming out of this." Many daily high-tempe ..read more

On our wildly diverse planet, scientists are still finding new species. Even mammals. While on an expedition in Nigeria in 2009, researchers noticed a curious bark-like call in the night. It turns out the source was a creature new to science, a species of tree hyrax — small, herbivorous mammals — called Dendrohyrax interfluvialis.   It's not easy to confirm a new species, especially when it comes to an elusive, nocturnal, forest-dwelling animal in a remote region. The scientists announced a description of the novel species on Monday. (In the video, the "shriek" sound of another h ..read more

They're back. The wildlife streamers explore.org officially turned on the Alaskan brown bear cams on Monday, June 14. The cameras, situated along the salmon-rich Brooks River in Katmai National Park and Preserve, film the internet-famous bears fishing, fighting, sleeping, playing, and beyond throughout the summer and fall. Bear activity usually ramps up in July, when salmon begin migrating up the river. Here's what to expect when tuning into the bear cams, which are beamed from a remote, mostly roadless part of Alaska, to people globally: July: The salmon run up the Brooks River kicks off i ..read more

Even on an Air Force base tarmac, a cicada landed on the president's neck.  The spectacular emergence of the Brood X cicadas — with some 1.5 million of the harmless insects emerging per acre in some places — has resulted in cicadas landing on people's shirts, arms, hair, and...beyond. But the bugs have no real interest in people: After 17 years of munching on roots underground, the brood emerges to hastily mate and lay eggs.  So what's going on? When cicadas emerge, they seek out trees, the places where they often congregate, mate, and ultimately lay eggs on the ends of branches. An ..read more

After a couple hours of sleep, Rachel Knight woke to an alarm set for 2 a.m. Two alarms, actually. Her phone and Amazon Echo clamored in tandem to make sure she didn’t sleep through the night. It was her turn to head out to the backyard and monitor the telescope. The Unistellar eVscope was pointed at the relatively clear sky over suburbs north of Los Angeles. It was mid-August, five months into the COVID-19 pandemic. Knight and her husband were tracking an asteroid, 787 Moskva, which orbits the sun between our neighbor Mars and its distant neighbor Jupiter. With a traditional telescope, they ..read more