Falls in whale sightings, rare seabirds appearing—is something unusual happening in the Southern Ocean?

In late June, whale watchers in southwest Western Australia sounded the alarm. They had seen far fewer humpback whales at a time when they normally migrate up from the Southern Ocean to calve and feed. Numbers were 60% below normal.

Ancient stardust grains were seeds for the earliest solids in the solar system

How did the first solids that made up planets, moons and asteroids form from the "hot soup" that characterized our solar system's earliest years? New research from Caltech analyzing pieces of a meteorite has found that, just as snowflakes crystallize around grains of dust, ancient stardust grains left over from long-gone suns may have been the seeds of our solar system's earliest solids.

Rainfall across the US is increasingly coming from farther away

Before rain falls, the moisture that forms it may have traveled anywhere from just a few kilometers to hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away. It usually begins as water that evaporated from oceans, lakes, forests or fields. According to a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, rain in parts of the United States is increasingly arriving from farther away.

Light's hidden properties save quantum information from the chaos of bad weather

For years, researchers have tried to harness the "twist" of light to transmit data. This property describes how light spirals as it travels forward, and because it can be molded into a virtually infinite number of different twists, it provides a massive, promising alphabet for high-capacity communication.

Volcanic eruptions in Pacific Ring of Fire may have cooled Earth for centuries

For around 12,000 years, the Earth has been in the Holocene epoch, a warmer period following a glacial period. During this epoch, however, there have been around 22 abrupt cold phases, each lasting up to several centuries and leading to the expansion of glaciers.

Could quantum physics help us find Earth 2.0?

When astronomers talk about directly imaging an exoplanet orbiting a faraway star, the analogy they most commonly use is trying to spot a firefly next to a massive searchlight. An Earth-like exoplanet is incredibly dim—usually between 100 million and 10 billion times fainter than its host star.

Is district cooling the solution we need for extreme heat in cities? | New Scientist

More than 77 million people in Europe enjoy district heating, where hot water is piped from a central plant to homes and buildings. The US has hundreds of these networks, mostly in multi-building campuses like universities, airports and business districts.

First-of-kind Guillain-Barré drug switches off part of immune system | New Scientist

The trillion-dollar question behind corporate net-zero pledges

Corporate climate spending now steers trillions of dollars in transition finance worldwide. Does it drive genuine climate action? Research shows that accounting flexibility alone can make a company's reported emissions vary by roughly a factor of two—enough to appear either as a climate leader or a laggard. A new perspective in Nature Sustainability proposes developing industry-specific net-zero blueprints to close that gap.

Meet the astronomer digging into the Milky Way's 'fossils'

Amina Helmi's passion for the Milky Way is clear as soon as one steps into her small office at the University of Groningen, in the north of the Netherlands.