global warming

Swimming season opens when the water feels tolerable. But everyone has their own threshold: one person shivers at twenty degrees, another swims comfortably at fifteen. Scientists decided to figure out where this difference comes from. They compared a swimmer's body to a house trying to keep heat in while a cold wind blows outside.

Space is expanding, and that expansion is accelerating. But what if, in the first instants after the Big Bang, gravity behaved differently? The authors of a new study added an invisible field to Einstein's equations that siphons energy from ordinary matter and radiation.

Meteorologists have grown used to trusting neural networks: the GraphCast model predicts Earth's weather days ahead by drawing on global snapshots of the atmosphere. But this 'brain' can be transplanted to another planet — where the air is thin and the Sun warms differently.

It all started with stretching. In the first fractions of a second, the universe ballooned — physicists call this inflation. Then the rapid expansion gave way to a phase where the field's energy converted into ordinary particles.

The early universe resembled an overheated cauldron, seething with quantum fluctuations (random bursts of energy). In this chaos, like steam over boiling water, a special field, the scalar field, condensed. It became the 'engine' that made space expand at an incredible rate. This process is called inflation.

The early Universe was like a tightly coiled spring. In the first moments, it expanded at an unimaginable rate — a phase called inflation. Usually, this is attributed to a special field, but there's another idea: spacetime itself twists like a spring, and this twisting (in physics, torsion) becomes the engine of expansion.

10⁻¹²⁰. That's not just a small number: it's a chasm. That's the ratio of dark energy density to the Planck density, the natural scale of quantum gravity. The colossal difference of 120 orders of magnitude has long seemed an unsolvable puzzle. But the answer might lie in a drama played out at the dawn of time.

The mystery of the radius valley — a sharp drop in the number of exoplanets with radii ~1.8 Earth — haunts astronomers. JWST, transit surveys like Kepler and TESS draw a clear gap: rocky super-Earths and gaseous sub-Neptunes are separated by almost a chasm.

The search for life beyond Earth is like tuning an old radio: we listen to the chemical whisper of distant exoplanets' atmospheres, trying to pick up signs of biological activity.

A translator in a conference hall tries to convey the speaker's words, but the hall is noisy: someone coughs, chairs creak, and the street outside is loud. If the speaker lowers their voice, the translator still keeps translating, but their voice drowns in the noise.

Earth's magnetic field is like an invisible shield that protects us from cosmic radiation. But if you look closely at its long-term averaged pattern, you'll notice that this shield isn't perfectly smooth: it has its own "seams" and "patches." New research using computer simulations of the geodynamo shows that…

Dark matter is the invisible scaffold that holds galaxies together. But how did it come to be? The standard answer: particles of dark matter once stopped colliding and "froze out" in the amount we see today. However, there's a trickier path — UFO, or ultra-fast freeze-out. Here, everything is like coffee that cools down and then heats up again as you carry it through a cold corridor.

A living organism is a machine that constantly channels energy through itself and converts it into heat. This internal cycle is called internal entropy production (a measure of energy dissipation). But about 2.5 million years ago, our ancestors switched on a second loop — an external one. They picked up a sharpened stone, and then a burning branch.

Every year, the food we eat costs humanity tens of millions of years of life due to unhealthy diets. At the same time, a third of all greenhouse gases warming the planet are produced along the journey from farm to plate. It seems obvious: switch to healthier eating, and we'll save the climate and improve our health. But new research shows these two goals don't always go hand in hand.

A giant drum has just taken a hit. Its membrane is still trembling, but besides the main boom, a fine ripple spreads across it — someone ran a finger over the taut skin. In much the same way, in the first moments after the Big Bang, spacetime vibrated not only with the "roar" of expansion but also with the tension of suddenly emerging magnetic fields.

A mosaic of large colored tiles. Each tile is the average precipitation over an entire month for an area the size of a small country. For a general understanding, the picture is fine, but if you need to know whether a downpour hit a specific city yesterday, it's useless.

Drylands are like skin cracking from dehydration. When rainfall decreases, plants don't vanish overnight: they rearrange, leaving bare patches of soil between them. These patterns are visible even from space. Scientists compared satellite images of eight arid regions, from the Sahel in Africa to Australian deserts.

Hundreds of people on a dance floor stand at equal distances from each other — strict order, like in a crystal lattice. Slow music is thermal vibrations, making dancers sway slightly. If the music gets louder and faster, order collapses: everyone mixes. That's how thermal motion destroys ordered states of electrons in solids.

Mars is an icy desert with an average temperature of minus 60. To warm it without biology, scientists propose three approaches with a single idea: create a thick heat-trapping blanket. First, deploy transparent film-blankets over bases. They let sunlight in but keep heat from escaping, allowing us to harvest water from the soil and grow plants.

Over the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, every six to eight weeks, a vast wave of moist air gathers. It moves eastward at a pedestrian pace—about five meters per second—and takes forty to ninety days to circle half the planet.

Today's Martian surface is a cold, nearly airless home. Many dream of a full renovation: warming the planet, filling it with air from carbon dioxide and nitrogen.

A student learned physics from a textbook and is taking an exam. The first two problems are solved brilliantly, but on the third, they err on something not covered in the book. That is roughly what the hybrid atmospheric model NeuralGCM faced when run through three levels of testing: cyclones, El Niño, and anomalous warming.

A planet's climate is like an old spring mattress: press down on one edge, the springs compress; let go, they rebound and put everything back. Earth has three such springs, working as a team. Carbon dioxide weathers out of rocks, clouds reflect sunlight, and ice caps bounce heat back into space. Together, they keep the planet from boiling or freezing.

In the standard cosmological model ΛCDM, galaxies recede under the pressure of dark energy — an invisible spring. However, different methods of measuring the expansion rate give different numbers, as if the ruler's scale is off.

Scientists built a model of Earth with all living organisms removed — from bacteria to trees. Over billions of years, this 'empty house' didn't turn into an icy desert. Volcanoes, like a furnace, release carbon dioxide, and rock weathering, like a thermostat, absorbs it.

Glaciers don't just darken from soot. Their surfaces host tiny algae that, as temperatures rise, bloom and turn the ice dark. Dark ice absorbs more sunlight, melts faster, and further warms the planet. It's like how a black t-shirt in the sun gets hotter than a white one. The second player in overheating is forests.

For a long time, the climate of ancient Mars remained a mystery: the beds of dried-up rivers spoke of water, but models couldn't explain how it got there — after all, 4 billion years ago the Sun shone 30% dimmer. New research shows that the planet swayed, as if on a swing, between long glaciations and short wet epochs.

An ice core from Antarctica is a time machine that recorded the climate for 130,000 years straight, year after year, with no gaps. Air bubbles trapped in the ice preserve the carbon dioxide of those ancient eras.

Rain doesn't fall just any old way. If you take records from nearly fifty thousand rain gauges scattered across the globe and compare how much water falls on a rainy day in different parts of the planet, you'll spot a surprising pattern.

In the first moments, the Universe went through a brief but turbulent period — inflation, when it expanded at a colossal speed. This idea was proposed by Alan Guth. At the same time, particles of ordinary matter were born.

The Tibetan Plateau is a giant sponge that soaks up rain and snow, then releases water to Asia's rivers. Since 2000, the sponge has been getting wetter. Scientists decided to check: does this moisture make the sponge stronger, or does it soften it? They used a measure of disorder — entropy.

The Sun is slowly brightening, and in hundreds of millions of years its heat would become lethal for Earth. Fortunately, the built-in planetary thermostat — the carbon cycle — when overheating triggers rocks to absorb carbon dioxide faster, cooling the climate.

Hot Jupiters, exoplanets giants snuggled up to their stars, are mysteriously puffed up. Their radii often exceed standard models by 50–100%. New models, based on transiting data (transit method), flip our understanding: heat doesn't come from the interior but from the upper atmosphere.

After the Moon's birth, Earth resembled a sizzling lump of dough: a continuous liquid magma and a dense shroud of gases. The Moon acted like a giant spoon, constantly kneading this lump with its gravity. Friction generated heat, delaying cooling.

An orchestra of two musicians plays from the same score, but each hears only their own line. The atmosphere and ocean in a climate model resemble such a duet: they exchange heat and moisture every few hours, yet until recently their neural network counterparts could not keep a common rhythm.

A translator at a high-stakes negotiation doesn't just render words quickly; they make sure the meaning doesn't get lost. CAMulator does the same: it takes the complex climate model CAM6 and translates it into the language of a neural network that runs hundreds of times faster, without losing the physical essence.

In the summer of 2023, thermometers around the world registered numbers that even the boldest forecasts had not anticipated. The planet's average temperature rose to 1.48°C above pre-industrial levels, a jump of 0.17°C that broke the previous record as if the climate had suddenly shifted gears.

Over warm ocean waters, air rises, spins, and turns into a giant vortex that carries winds faster than a race car. For such a vortex to form, several conditions must align: rotation, heat, moisture, and calm winds aloft. Previously, meteorologists combined these conditions into complex indices, like a kitchen recipe with a dozen ingredients.

Picture an orchestra where each instrument plays at its own tempo: violins speed up, woodwinds slow down, and percussion keeps losing the beat. That's roughly what Earth's climate looks like, with the ocean, the Sun, volcanoes, and human activity pulling temperature in different directions.

In the mountains, an echo repeats any shout, and you can't immediately tell who shouted: a person or the wind. That's roughly how climate scientists work when they try to understand why an unusual heat wave or drought happened. They look for a human fingerprint in a weather disaster, but nature has its own voices that can sound similar.