Northern Lights Dance across U.S. because of ‘Stealthy’ Sun Eruptions

Night skies across the U.S. danced with streaks of green and magenta this past week. People as far south as Asheville, N.C., and Phoenix, Ariz., had the unexpected pleasure of witnessing the Northern Lights. “My Twitter feed was inundated. Every femtosecond, a new picture appeared,” says Scott McIntosh, a solar physicist and deputy director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “It was pretty special.” The driving force behind the unusual light show was a severe geomagnetic storm that caught space weather forecasters by surprise. Rated at level 4 on a five-point scale, it was “the biggest storm in many years,”

Could Grinding Up Lithium Batteries Help Recycle Them?

Grinding up old batteries might lead to a low-energy way to recycle the lithium and other metals used in them. Lithum-ion batteries are in all our personal technology — such as phones, laptops and wireless headphones — and they power electric vehicles. Without them, our lives would look very different. The lithium in rechargeable batteries is currently recycled by either heating them to high temperatures or treating them with concentrated acids and organic solvents. Estimates for how much lithium is recycled vary, but calculations by lithium-battery consultant Hans Eric Melin suggest that perhaps 15% of the metal in batteries is recovered. Oleksandr

Recent Gamma-Ray Burst May Be the Brightest Ever Seen

An extragalactic outburst whose light hurtled through the inner solar system last fall was 70 times brighter than any other such eruption that scientists have observed, researchers report. Radiation from the explosion — a gamma-ray burst (GRB) known as GRB 221009A — swept over Earth on Oct. 9, 2022. It saturated gamma-ray detectors on multiple space telescopes, earning the nickname the BOAT, short for "brightest of all time." Astronomers continued studying the BOAT with a variety of instruments for several months afterward, seeking to characterize the explosion further. And those efforts have only added to the BOAT's legend. "It is just an absolutely monstrous burst. It is

Rural Children Now Grow Slightly Taller than City Children in Wealthy Countries

Science has long presumed that children living in cities grow faster and healthier than rural kids—but that trend has flipped over the past two decades, a new study suggests. A global study published Wednesday in Nature found that the average height of urban children and adolescents ages 5 to 19 is now slightly shorter than that of their peers in rural areas in most countries—notably in wealthy countries such as the U.S., the U.K. and France. “Where we've historically seen a quite clear benefit for living in cities, that benefit has been slightly diminished over time,” says study co-author Honor

Why Primates (Including Humans) Love to Spin Ourselves around until We All Fall Down

In 2011 Marcus Perlman saw a YouTube video of a gorilla named Zola spinning in circles while playing in a water puddle at the Calgary Zoo in Alberta. In 2017 he noticed Zola again, this time in a viral video from the Dallas Zoo in Texas. Zola whirled in a plastic blue kiddie pool as the water splashed up around him. Perlman, a lecturer in English language and linguistics at the University of Birmingham in England, had done research on communicative gesturing, and the YouTube video sparked his curiosity about this form of great ape behavior display. He looked for

Smell-Loss Tests Could Reveal Health Problems

I was in the third grade when I realized I couldn’t smell. My class was on a field trip to a wastewater treatment plant and while everyone around me was disgusted by the stench, I had no problem with it whatsoever. I had anosmia, the loss or impairment of the ability to smell. Many doctor visits later I discovered why. Rather than acquiring anosmia through a virus or traumatic injury, I was likely born without fully formed olfactory bulbs—a condition known as congenital anosmia. Estimates vary, but according to the National Institutes of Health, nearly one in four Americans older