THE CRUX

9 Ways to Instantly Cut Your Environmental Impact

Buying clothes and other items second hand is a great way to cut your environmental impact. (Credit: Cabeca de Marmore/Shutterstock)

Helping the environment might seem like an impossible task, especially when there are a couple billion other people out there, still doing their thing. But even just cutting your current environmental impact a little is better than doing nothing at all. So, here are a few ideas to get you started.

Buy Stuff Second Hand

What has less of an impact than buy …

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Hubble Sheds New Light on Lives of Star Clusters

A new look at the Large Magellanic Cloud is helping astronomers better understand how groups of stars evolve. (Credit: ESA/NASA)

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has taken new observations of
the Large Magellanic Cloud, a small, neighboring galaxy to our Milky Way and
found new insights into the star clusters that live there.

Star clusters are quite common in the universe. If a galaxy
is a cosmic metropolis, star clusters would be like a small town. They form as huge
clouds of gas and du …

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Insecticides May Be Giving Songbirds Anorexia and Delaying Their Migrations

An experiment with white-crowned sparrows shows that insecticides may be impacting songbirds. (Credit: Phil Lowe/Shutterstock)

Some migrating songbirds may be starving thanks to agricultural pesticides. Neonicotinoids are popular insecticides used in industrial agriculture across the U.S. But the chemicals’ are controversial because of their detrimental impact on bees and other pollinators.

Now, a group of researchers has added heat to the debate, showing that even small amounts of one pa …

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Adrenaline Doesn’t Actually Cause the Fight-or-Flight Response, New Study Says

When you’re overcome with fear, it’s not adrenaline making you want to fight or flee. (Credit: Master1305/Shutterstock)

A thrilling high when you’re faced with danger, a boost of energy when you’re going for an intense run – we tend to associate these rushes with adrenaline, a hormone synonymous with our fight-or-flight response. But it turns out adrenaline might not be what activates our brains’ stress reaction after all.

In fact, our bones might be doing more work than we origina …

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Astronomers May Have Just Discovered an Interstellar Comet Visiting Our Solar System

Astronomers first found Comet C/2019 Q4 on August 30. The past week of observations, including this image taken by the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Hawaii’s Big Island, have increased astronomers confidence that the comet started life in another solar system. (Credit: Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope)

A newly discovered comet has astronomers excited. Formally
named C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), the object appears to have come from outside our
solar system. If confirmed, that would make it the seco …

IMAGEO

The dreaded “blob” may be back in the Pacific Ocean

A gigantic area of super-warm water has formed again off the U.S. West Coast, threatening impacts on weather and wildlife

A map of sea surface temperature anomalies shows a blob of very warm water off the West Coast of the North America. (Source: Climate Reanalyzer, University of Maine)

Five years ago, a gigantic cauldron of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean wreaked havoc on marine ecosystems and contributed to drought along the western coast of North America.

Dubbed “The Blob …

ROCKY PLANET

We Ignore Expertise at Our Own Peril

Hurricane Dorian seen from the MODIS imager on Terra, August 31, 2019. NASA.

We seem to now live in an age where people are comfortable ignoring experts, especially those in the sciences.

You may have noticed that Hurricane Dorian didn’t hit Alabama. Depending on the circles in which you run, you might think it was a “close call” or a completely mistaken statement that Alabama was ever in any real danger from the hurricane. However, what is clear is that when experts in meteorology — the …

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Many Cancer Drugs Don’t Work Like Scientists Say They Do, New Study Suggests

(Credit: Shidlovski/Shutterstock)

Cancer therapies often fail to work when tested in clinical trials. As a result, a startling 97 percent of drugs designed for specific cancer treatments do not receive approval from the Food and Drug Administration. Now researchers say they may have figured out part of the reason why.

In a new study out Wednesday in the journal Science Translational Medicine, scientists report many cancer drugs don’t work the way their designers assumed th …

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A ‘Brown Tide’ of Seaweed is Choking the Caribbean and Worrying Scientists

Dead seaweed chokes beaches across the Caribbean every year. (Credit: Playa del Carmen/Shutterstock)

(Inside Science) — In the summer of 2018, thousands of tons of a prolific seaweed called sargassum invaded the pristine beaches of the Caribbean. In Mexico, the turquoise waters and clear, smooth sand of the touristy Mayan Riviera turned into a brown mess. The sight of sargassum — a type of brown algae — and its smell scared tourists away, and local ecosystems started to suffer greatly.

…

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Giant Bubbles Spotted Rushing Out from Milky Way’s Center

The MeerKAT telescope is superimposed on a radio image of the Milky Way’s center. Radio bubbles extend from between the two nearest antennas to the upper right corner, with filaments running parallel to the bubbles. (Credit: SARAO/MeerKAT)

The Milky Way is blowing bubbles. Two giant radio bubbles,
extending out from the galaxy for over 1,400 light years, were just discovered
in X-ray data. Astronomers think the bubbles started forming a few million
years ago due to some type of cataclysmic  …