The Watchers team and our contributors bring the latest on extreme weather, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, space weather, and all things science. We're all about making sense of the natural world and keeping you informed on what’s happening. Got a tip or a question? Hit us up using the form at newstips!
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health researchers say that levels of radon in Pennsylvania homes – where 42 percent of readings surpass what the U.S. government considers safe – have been on the rise since 2004, around the time that the fracking in
In the footsteps of Mircea Eliade, mythologists and anthropologists tend to think of the axis mundi or ‘world axis’ as a straight object running through the cosmos vertically. While this is, of course, correct for the astronomical axis of the earth, the &lsq
The Sun undergoes a type of seasonal variability, with its activity waxing and waning over the course of nearly two years, according to a new study by a team of researchers led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). This behavior affects the peaks and v
In March, the NASA Dawn Spacecraft entered the orbit of the mysterious dwarf planet Ceres, with the craft scheduled to begin sending images to Earth later this month.For several weeks, surprising and unexplained bright spots within a crater on the planet’s surface
In September 1998 astrophysicists documented an inexplicable “tug” acting on the now defunct Ulysses spacecraft as it traveled through the Solar System in an orbit over the Sun’s poles. When radio signals from Earth were returned from an onboard
There’s no feature of the Sun that cannot be explained with my proposed model and without any contradictions. The current theory is only an elegant mathematical theory and it cannot explain any basic feature of the Sun, not just the solar neutrino problem. And let
It is a great paradox in comet science: We are told that a comet nucleus is a ball of ice, or dirty snowball, or icy fluff ball that accreted billions of year ago in the solar system’s infancy. Comets are said to sublimate ices as they move toward the sun, and
Lightning occurs more often over land than over the oceans and it seems to happen more often closer to the equator, according to satellite observations.The map below shows the average yearly counts of lightning flashes per square kilometer from 1995 to 2013. Areas with
Millions of images of celestial objects, including asteroids, observed by NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft are now available online to the public. The data was collected following the restart of the asteroid-seeking s
Complex rings, knots, and twisted streamers are often ejected from stars (and other celestial objects). The overall shape of so-called “planetary nebula” sometimes reveal gigantic, bifurcated jets emerging from the central star, indicating the beginnings of
