In results reported in a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, graduate student Tatsuya Akiba, along with JILA Fellow and University of Colorado Boulder Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences professor Ann-Marie Madigan and undergraduate student Selah McIntyre, believe they have found a reason why white dwarfs eat their nearby planetesimals.

The global demand for palm oil—the most widely consumed vegetable oil on the planet, in everything from instant noodles to lipstick—is driving worldwide tropical deforestation. While many studies have shown the loss of biodiversity when rainforests are converted to oil palm plantations, researchers at the University of Massachusetts of Amherst are the first to show far-reaching and wide-ranging disturbances to the watersheds in which such plantations occur. Because many Indigenous peoples rely on water downstream from the plantations for their daily needs, the marked decrease in water quality has the potential to exacerbate public health issues in Indigenous communities. The study was published recently in Science of the Total Environment.

A new study in Nature Physics from physicists at The University of Texas at Arlington reports on a deep new probe into the interface between the theories of gravity and quantum mechanics, using ultra-high energy neutrino particles detected by a particle detector set deep into the Antarctic glacier at the south pole.

Recent reports of NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope finding signs of life on a distant planet understandably sparked excitement. A UC Riverside study challenges this finding, but also outlines how the telescope might verify the presence of the life-produced gas.