The Tropics as a Clean Laboratory: What They Tell Us About CO2
In 1998, the planet's thermometer set a record that still stands. Global temperature spiked and then leveled off, even as CO2 emissions kept rising.
The Second Derivative of CO₂: How the Atmosphere Governs Climate
An interpreter gets distracted by every rustle in the hall, and a one-hour meeting stretches into two. The atmosphere is like such an interpreter: it hears not only the biosphere's words but also its tone. When plants change the pace at which they absorb carbon dioxide, the air responds not to the gas itself but to how quickly and how abruptly its amount changes.
The Carbon Echo of the Pandemic: How Lockdown Reverberated in the Atmosphere
In spring 2020, Earth's atmosphere seemed to hold its breath. Transport ground to a halt, factories fell silent, and carbon dioxide emissions from burning fuel dropped by nearly eight percent. But spotting this "carbon echo" on a global scale proved tricky: the atmosphere is constantly mixing, forests and oceans breathe, and weather adds its own noise.
The Climate Orchestra: Who Really Conducts Global Warming?
The orchestra of world weather is playing a tune we didn't expect. The first violin is not carbon dioxide but chlorofluorocarbons—gases that until recently hid in refrigerators and aerosol cans. They trap heat ten thousand times more effectively than CO₂, and for decades they have been quietly warming the planet.
Why the Planet Hit the Brakes on Warming for a Quarter Century
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.
Ocean Hints at Rain: The Hidden Mechanics of the Monsoon
In the summer of 2022, the sky over western India seemed to have forgotten about drought: rains fell more often than usual, while eastern states languished in dryness. Such an imbalance puzzled forecasters, because ocean currents in the Pacific had promised a steady, abundant monsoon across the country.
Record CO₂: When the Planet's Lungs Held Their Breath
The carbon cycle is like the planet's breathing. Forests and oceans inhale carbon dioxide, while industry and wildfires exhale it back. In 2023, that inhale became gasping and shallow. At the Mauna Loa station, instruments recorded that CO₂ concentrations rose by 3.37 parts per million over the year, 86% faster than the year before.
Night Flashes: Hunting for Split-Second Signals
A firefly blinks for one ten-billionth of a second somewhere above the Siberian taiga. Seeing such a thing is impossible, but the TAIGA-HiSCORE array, spread across a valley in the Tunkinsky district of Buryatia, tried to catch exactly such flashes — not from insects, but from the depths of space.
The Planet's Breath Stumbles: How El Niño Stilled Earth's Lungs
From July 2023 to July 2024, Earth's atmosphere gained carbon dioxide at a rate of 3.66 parts per million per year. That is the fastest pace since 1979. The reason is not that factories and cars suddenly started emitting more CO₂. The planet's lungs—forests and soils—took a shallower breath.
The planet breathes through its green cover.
Interstellar Visitors: How to Catch a Signal from Alien Technology
In October 2017, the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawaii spotted an object moving too fast to belong to the solar system. It was 1I/ʻOumuamua, the first interstellar visitor ever recorded by astronomers. Since then, two more have joined it: comet 2I/Borisov and object 3I/ATLAS.
A Carbon Forge on a Windy Planet Around a Pulsar
A wind blowing against the planet's rotation stokes a carbon forge. That is what the atmosphere of PSR J2322-2650b looks like: a Jupiter-like companion to a millisecond pulsar.
Can the Moon have its own moon?
The Moon can have its own tiny moon — like a nesting doll, but in space. The outer doll is a planet, the middle one is a moon, the inner one is a small moon-satellite, or submoon. Ньютон showed that all bodies attract each other, and gravity holds them together.
Two Probes Will Dive into the Tail of an Interstellar Comet
Stretched for millions of kilometers, the tail of Comet 3I/ATLAS consists of rarefied gas and microscopic dust grains. In late October 2025, two Earth probes, Europa Clipper and Hera, will plunge into it. Neither was designed to encounter a comet: Clipper is headed for a moon of Jupiter, Hera for an asteroid.
The Hunt for Moons of Rogue Planets
In the vast darkness of interstellar space, the rogue planet WISE 0855 flickers with a barely perceptible heat glow, like a cooling ember. Its temperature is only a few dozen degrees above freezing — if life existed there, it would see a sunless sky, in an eternal icy haze.
Shadow or Mirage: Hunting a Moon Around a Scorching Jupiter
The hunt for exomoons — the search for satellites around planets of other stars — resembles watching shadows in a theater where the spotlight keeps fading and flaring. The planet Kepler-167e, a gas giant near a scorching star, was discovered by William Borucki and his team.
Rusty Heart of an Interstellar Comet Makes It Shine
The second interstellar guest, comet 3I/ATLAS, shines unusually due to rusting metal grains in its icy core. As it gets closer to the Sun, it behaves like an old tin can tossed into a fire: the heat melts the ice, water seeps into the metal, and vigorous corrosion begins.
Plant Life Could Last Over a Billion Years
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.
The Quantum Puzzle of Nitrogen
In every handful of fertile soil, there are bacteria that do something no factory can: they take nitrogen straight from the air and turn it into fertilizer. The secret lies in the enzyme nitrogenase, and its working core, a cluster of iron and molybdenum atoms, looks like a tiny factory floor.
Chemists have long tried to understand how this factory works from the inside.
A Dusty Barrier: How Astronomers Caught a Ghostly Meteor Shower Over Maunakea
October 6, 2021, 8:30 PM Hawaii time. The StarCam camera on the dome of the Subaru Telescope gazes impassively at the sky, streaming the view on YouTube. Four and a half hours earlier, somewhere far away, Earth passed through an invisible trail — the dust tail of comet 15P/Finlay. Models predicted a peak, but would anyone see these 'shooting stars'?
Ice Has a Memory: How Antarctica Responds to Carbon Dioxide
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.
The Mystery of Asteroid Kamo'oalewa: Why It's Not from the Moon
Kamo'oalewa is Earth's partner in a peculiar gravitational dance: it orbits the Sun almost in unison with us, edging closer and then pulling away. Its color — the palette of reflected light — matches the lunar surface. Hence the initial thought: it's a chunk of the Moon from the Giordano Bruno crater.
Organic Chemistry Around a Young Planet
Around the star HD 163296, 330 light-years away, a dense ring of gas and dust is swirling. Astronomers have spotted a small but bright patch of hydrogen cyanide and ethynyl molecules within it. It hangs at a distance of 88 astronomical units from the star — farther than Pluto is from the Sun.
The heat from a forming planet hidden in that patch melts the icy dust.
Tumbling Comet: How an Icy Visitor Spins After Its Solar Encounter
An icy chunk the size of a small town hurtles through space. As it approaches the Sun, the ice starts to vaporize, and jets of gas and dust burst from the comet. These jets act like tiny rocket engines: they push the comet and make it spin. That's exactly what astronomers observed with comet 3I/ATLAS after it rounded the Sun.
Dancing in Orbit: How Hot Jupiters Choose Their Path
Three distant giant planets circle their stars so closely that a year on them lasts just a few Earth days. These worlds are called hot Jupiters, and their orbits are a real puzzle: how did they end up right next to the star if they were born far away, in the cold outskirts of the system? One key clue is the angle at which a planet orbits relative to the star's rotation.
How the Tiniest 'Invisible Molecule' Shatters Apart
In the air we breathe, invisible chemical events are constantly unfolding. One of them is the birth and instant death of a particle with the formula H₂COO. Known as an 'intermediate,' it appears for a split second when ozone molecules collide with organic compounds, then immediately shatters into simpler fragments.
Weighing a Stellar Giant Baby
At the center of a cosmic dust cloud, astronomers detected an invisible star. It's wrapped in a rotating gas disk. This disk works like a set of scales: the gas speed at different distances from the center reveals the star’s mass.
The pattern is simple: the closer to the center, the faster the motion.
Earth Can Heat Itself Up
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.
How Gold-Ruthenium Alloys Restructure in Ammonia
In a jeweler's workshop, gold is never mixed with ruthenium: one is soft and shiny, the other refractory and brittle. But at the nanometer scale, these metals merge into a single alloy that, when heated, begins to separate like oil and water in a cooling broth.
Rogue Moons: Warmth Without a Star
Rogue planets, ejected from star systems, may harbor life on their moons. A moon of such a planet can preserve heat and liquid water for billions of years. The whole secret lies in a reliable "blanket" and an internal "stove."
The stove is tidal forces: they squeeze and stretch the moon's interior, heating it up like kneading clay.
How Two-Headed Comets Are Born
The icy body Arrokoth looks like a snowman: two spheres pressed together. Many such two-headed objects exist beyond Neptune's orbit, in the Kuiper Belt. For a long time, it was thought they formed from the slow collision of two separate bodies.
New simulations show a different path. A cloud of small pebbles around the young Sun collapses under its own gravity.
Bubbles Line Up on Their Own
In a narrow vertical tube, alcohol flows upward, surrounded by water, and carbon dioxide bubbles are born inside it. As soon as they appear, they rush toward the axis of the flow, as if an invisible hand gathers them into a neat chain.
Magic Sand Saves Water in the Desert
In the desert, the sun sucks water out of the ground. But a layer of water-repellent sand just 5–10 mm thick works like a lid: air passes through, but water is blocked. Evaporation drops by 63–83%.
Under such a lid, sand behavior flips upside down. Normally, fine sand loses moisture 37% faster than coarse sand because it heats up more.
How a Machine Learns to Derive the Laws of Nature
When a typical computer searches for a law of nature from data, it tries to guess a complete formula in one go. It's like a cook who, without knowing the recipe, dumps all the ingredients into a pot at once and hopes for soup. Most often, the result is an inedible mess: the formula is long but meaningless, and it fails on new data.
A Comet with a Steering Wheel: Four Engines for an Interstellar Voyage
An icy rock is flying through the Solar System on an open trajectory — coming in from interstellar space, swinging around the Sun, and heading back into the dark.
A Spaceship Made from a Comet
A comet hurtling through space is a mountain of ice and dust that carries itself across the Solar System. If you mount small engines on such a mountain, it becomes a ship with its own fuel: gas from the interior can be vented through nozzles to change course.
Interstellar Comet: Water 14 Times Heavier Than Earth's
Comet 3I/ATLAS was spotted when it entered the Solar System from interstellar space. The James Webb Telescope split the light from its gas cloud into a rainbow, a spectrum, and in this pattern, the lines of rare molecules with deuterium (heavy hydrogen) appeared.
Bubbles vs. Pressure: Making Hydrogen Cheaper
Splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen with electricity is an age-old dream of clean fuel. But tiny gas bubbles stand in the way: they cling to the electrodes like foam on the side of a soda glass, interfering with the current's work. Each bubble is a tiny plug, blocking part of the surface where the reaction should occur.
Seven Planets March in Lockstep
Every 1151 years, seven planets of the Solar System, from Mercury to Neptune, find themselves at almost the same points in their orbits. Their positions scatter by less than a degree, as if the celestial mechanism is wound to the same tune. This rhythm was discovered by comparing planetary positions over 2600 years using precise tables of celestial motion.
Moons of Distant Planets: What's Keeping Us from Seeing Them
The light from a distant star is never steady. It shimmers like heat over hot asphalt. When astronomers pointed JWST at the star TOI 700, they saw this shimmer especially clearly: every 16 minutes, the brightness changed by a tiny fraction, just 46 parts per million.For comparison: if you placed a light bulb a kilometer away, this change would be…
A Quiet Ear on the Far Side of the Moon
On Earth, the radio spectrum is clogged with signals: communications, television, radar. But on the far side of the Moon, it's quiet. There, Earth's noise is inaudible, and that's exactly where China's Chang'e-4 went to listen to the cosmos for the first time, hunting for alien radio transmissions.
Scientists processed the recordings from its antennas.