A major chemical emergency in Garden Grove, Orange County, has forced around 40,000 residents to leave their homes after a storage tank at the GKN Aerospace facility began overheating and releasing hazardous vapours. The chemical inside the tank is methyl methacrylate, or MMA, a volatile industrial liquid used in plastics and resin manufacturing. Officials warned…
Brian Cox (Image: Wikipedia) Something is interesting about human beings that appears very early in life. Children ask endless questions before they know anything about science, philosophy or technology. They ask where stars go during the day. They ask why the sky changes colours in the evening. They ask why birds fly, why oceans seem…
Gold has fascinated civilisations for millennia because of one remarkable quality: it rarely loses its shine. Ancient coins, jewellery and royal artefacts buried for thousands of years can still emerge gleaming with their familiar golden glow. Scientists have long known that gold resists corrosion better than most metals, but the exact atomic mechanisms behind this…
Imagine an ocean so enormous it stretched across half the planet, wider than the Atlantic, older than the Himalayas, home to creatures we’ve only read about in history books. It was called the Tethys Ocean, and for hundreds of millions of years, it sat between the ancient landmasses that would eventually become Europe, Africa, and…
Deep beneath the eastern Pacific Ocean, roughly a thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador, the seafloor has been keeping time. Every five to six years, in almost the same locations, at almost the same intensity, a magnitude 6 earthquake strikes with a regularity so precise that scientists reached for the word “clockwork” to describe…
The link between artificial light at night, street lights, light pollution, biodiversity destruction, nocturnal fauna, bats, insects, and birds is becoming more evident in modern environmental science. It has been suggested that too much light during the night not only causes comfort for humans but also becomes a serious threat to the environment. Research concerning…
For 25 years, the ISS was the only address humans kept beyond Earth. It is closing. What replaces it is not one station; it is an orbital economy, built by private companies and designed to manufacture things that cannot be made on the ground.In November 2000, two Russian cosmonauts and one American astronaut moved into…
Viktor Frankl (Image: Wikipedia) People usually imagine that difficult situations are what make life unbearable. It sounds like a reasonable assumption because it matches what most of us see around us. Financial stress weighs people down. Illness changes families. Relationships break. Careers take unexpected turns. Some periods feel unfair even when someone has done everything…
Long before humans existed, giant marine predators ruled the warm prehistoric seas that once covered much of North America. Among them was a newly identified species called Tylosaurus rex, a massive mosasaur that stretched nearly 43 feet in length and lived more than 80 million years ago. Armed with serrated teeth, powerful jaws and strong…
SpaceX may be preparing one of the most extraordinary executive reward packages ever conceived, and it is tied to an ambition that sounds more like science fiction than corporate strategy. According to reports surrounding the company’s long-term compensation structure, Elon Musk could eventually receive the biggest reward payout in history if he succeeds in helping…
