Antarctic ice is melting at a startling pace, and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the greatest sources of uncertainty in climate projections. Researchers thought westerly winds were accelerating ice loss, but a new study flips the narrative by 90 degrees, pointing instead to winds from the north.

LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA celebrate the anniversary of the first gravitational waves detection and announce verification of Stephen Hawking's Black Hole Area Theorem

Soil nutrients support plants, and the animals who consume plants return these nutrients to the soil, creating a nutrient cycle. In a new study published in Ecology, scientists from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI) found that in prairie grasslands, the smallest herbivores—namely prairie dogs and grasshoppers—increase rates of nutrient cycling to a greater degree than larger herbivores such as bison and cattle.

SAN ANTONIO — September 10, 2025 — A new study led by Southwest Research Institute’s Dr. Michael Starkey has provided observational evidence from the SwRI-led Magnetospheric Multiscale (MMS) Mission of pickup ions (PUIs) and associated wave activity in the near-Earth solar wind environment. The MMS mission, launched by NASA in 2015, placed four spacecraft in orbit to observe Earth’s magnetosphere, a magnetic field around the planet that shields it from harmful solar and cosmic radiation.

By reducing blur and distortion, a new method could expand the practical use of single-pixel imaging for surveillance and other applications

Physicists have long believed that black holes explode at the end of their lives, and that such explosions happen—at most—only once every 100,000 years. But new research published in Physical Review Letters by physicists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has found a more than 90% probability that one of these black-hole explosions might be seen within the decade, and that, if we are prepared, our current fleet of space and earthbound telescopes could witness the event.