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Planet Nine will be discovered in the next decade. Here’s why.

The planet that we are searching for is a little bit smaller and closer than we originally thought.

  • Years ago, California Institute of Technology professor Konstantin Batygin was inspired to embark on a journey of discovering what lurked beyond Neptune. What he and his collaborator discovered was a strange field of debris.
  • This field of debris exhibited a clustering of orbits, and something was keeping these orbits confined. The only plausible source would be the gravitational pull of an extra planet—Planet Nine.
  • While Planet Nine hasn't been found directly, the pieces of the puzzle are coming together. And Batygin is confident we'll return to a nine-planet solar system within the next decade.
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asteroid astronomy biosphere cosmos dark matter discovery intelligence mars nasa planets science space sun universe

You’re not going far from home – and neither are the animals you spy out your window

Maybe you've been wondering if you're seeing one persistent squirrel or a rotating cast of characters.

Photo by Toimetaja tõlkebüroo on Unsplash

Watching the wildlife outside your window can boost your mental well-being, and it's something lots of people have been doing a lot more of lately.

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Ecology environment birds nature biosphere animals

Ask an Astronaut: What surprised you most in space?

  • Astronaut Garrett Reisman took in countless indescribably beautiful views while he lived in space. But most shocking, he says, was observing the thinness of Earth's atmosphere.
  • You can compare the thickness of the atmosphere to the diameter of Earth to the skin on an apple, or the shell of an egg. It's incredibly thin and shows just how seemingly fragile our planet is.
  • But to put this into perspective, whereas the atmosphere reaches a height of 300,000 feet from Earth's surface, the deepest part of the ocean only reaches 35,000 feet, ten times thinner than Earth's atmosphere. Everything we experience on Earth, from sea to sky, exists on just a tiny slice of precious surface coating.
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Is it too late to halt climate change? No, no, and no.

The impact of giving up is exactly the same as the impact of denying climate change.

Image source: Bedrin/Shutterstock
  • Disheartened, many are convinced there's no fighting climate change at this point.
  • There's no single on/off switch, however, so we can still lessen its effects.
  • It's up to us to make the crisis our leaders' priority.
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global issues science education government sustainability biosphere climate change

World’s oldest forest found in New York state​

The 385-million-year-old fossils show that trees evolved modern features millions of years earlier than previously estimated.

(Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
  • The world's oldest forest fossils were located in an abandoned quarry near Cairo, New York.
  • Research of site specimens suggests that the forebearers to modern plants evolved much earlier than expected.
  • The findings help scientists better understand how trees advanced life's evolutionary trajectory to land during a critical period.
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biosphere botany climate change ecology environment nature plants trees
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