All posts tagged: Earth

Old jeans could shield your home from the next heatwave – Down to Earth

Old jeans could shield your home from the next heatwave – Down to Earth

Published by Sam Flores

To display this content from YouTube, you must enable advertisement tracking and audience measurement. Accept Manage my choices One of your browser extensions seems to be blocking the video player from loading. To watch this content, you may need to disable it on this site. Try again Cover image: DOWN TO EARTH © FRANCE 24 Issued on: 12/10/2026 – 15:42Modified: 12/10/2026 – 15:45 09:02 min From the show Reading time 1 min We all have that one pair of old jeans in the back of our wardrobe – don’t throw them out! A French company says denim fibres make for great insulation against the cold and heat. Millions of jeans are already being recycled in a factory in north of the country. Their insulating panels have even found their way into some of France’s most iconic buildings. Our Down to Earth team reports. By: Video by: Source link

The week in pictures: French student protests, October 7 anniversary and Adenot’s return to Earth

The week in pictures: French student protests, October 7 anniversary and Adenot’s return to Earth

Published by Sam Flores

Home Europe Blockades and protests by French secondary school and university students continued, occasionally becoming violent; French astronaut Sophie Adenot returned to Earth after eight months aboard the International Space Station; Israel’s commemorations marking the three-year anniversary of the October 7 attacks: here’s a look back at some of the most striking images from the past week’s news. Issued on: 11/10/2026 – 15:17 2 min Reading time Saint-Denis Mayor Bally Bagayoko reacts as he stands between protesters and police officers during a demonstration of high-school students in Paris on October 6, 2026, as part of a nationwide protest movement over learning conditions. © Kenzo Tribouillard, AFP Students walk past graffiti reading “the class struggle begins in high school” near the lycée Sophie-Germain in Paris on October 9, 2026 as part of a nationwide protest movement over learning conditions. © Lou Benoist, AFP An aerial view shows people waving Israeli flags as they stand on a commemorative installation set up on a Tel Aviv beach marking the third anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attacks on Israel, October …

Between Earth and Sky | Sophie Pinkham

Between Earth and Sky | Sophie Pinkham

Published by Jenni Sidey

Oleksandr Dovzhenko was a connoisseur of clouds. In many of his shots, the big sky of Ukraine’s fields and steppe swallows the frame. When tiny human forms emerge upward into the heavens, they come as a surprise. As they grow they become monumental, often viewed from below. This is a fairly standard technique in Soviet visual art, which had a mandate to make workers look like heroes. But Dovzhenko goes a step further by making his characters look less like statues than like natural features, the wrinkles on their faces as noble as riverbeds. Earth (1930), Dovzhenko’s silent masterpiece, is not only a celebration of agricultural collectivization—a predictable assignment for a filmmaker working at a Soviet studio—but an ode to the cycles of life, which resist the linear logic of Stalinist industrialization. In the opening scene, an old man eats a pear, smiles, and expires under a fruit tree; a beautiful death. His grandson Vasyl, a strapping young peasant, the hero of the collectivization effort, brings in the village’s first tractor to great fanfare, but …

A starquake 10 billion years ago may have just sent a flash to Earth

A starquake 10 billion years ago may have just sent a flash to Earth

Published by skeptic

A split-second flash of radio waves traveled through space for more than 10 billion years to reach Earth, making it the farthest fast radio burst anyone has detected and confirmed. Fast radio bursts, or FRBs, last only a few thousandths of a second but release enormous amounts of energy. Scientists spotted the first one in 2007, and they still don’t know what causes them. Most flash only once, which makes them extremely hard to chase. South Africa’s MeerKAT radio telescope caught this one, dubbed FRB 20240304B, on March 4, 2024. After failing to find its origin with the world’s largest ground-based telescopes, the team, led by Manisha Caleb and Themiya Nanayakkara of the University of Sydney in Australia, turned to NASA‘s James Webb Space Telescope. Finally, it came into focus: a faint galaxy from when the universe was only about 3 billion years old — more than double the distance of the prior record.  Until now, astronomers mostly managed to find and measure the sources of bursts much closer to home. This one shows researchers …

ESA and AEE launch 8 Earth observation projects to tackle Spanish wildfires

ESA and AEE launch 8 Earth observation projects to tackle Spanish wildfires

Published by skeptic

Eight new Earth observation projects have begun in Spain following a joint co-funding call from ESA InCubed and the Spanish Space Agency (AEE). With a combined investment of €3m, the initiatives are designed to improve how Spanish wildfires are anticipated, detected, monitored and managed. The projects, which signed contracts with ESA InCubed and began in July 2026, bring together satellite Earth observation, artificial intelligence (AI), meteorological modelling and other technologies. Their applications cover different stages of wildfire management, from prevention and risk forecasting to active-fire monitoring and post-fire assessment. The programme comes as the need for stronger wildfire capabilities has become increasingly urgent. Heatwaves, prolonged drought and changing weather patterns are contributing to wildfires becoming more frequent, intense and difficult to predict, while recent Spanish wildfires have highlighted the threat to communities, ecosystems and infrastructure. Commenting on the initiative, Carlos Urbina Ortega, End-to-end System Engineer at ESA Φ-lab Invest Office and InCubed Officer for the management of this national campaign in Spain, said: “Wildfires are becoming faster and more dangerous, threatening lives, homes and ecosystems. …

Scientists find evidence for several Earth axis shifts during the age of dinosaurs

Scientists find evidence for several Earth axis shifts during the age of dinosaurs

Published by Jenni Sidey

A new study finds evidence that Earth may have undergone several episodes of rapid true polar wander during the past 320 million years, with the strongest signals in the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Instead of relying primarily on ancient magnetic fields, researchers tracked patterns of continental flooding and retreat caused when the solid Earth shifted relative to its spin axis. The results support rapid events between about 150 and 140 million years ago and 100 and 90 million years ago, while challenging the idea that true polar wander has always been negligible or persistently slow. Earth’s geographic poles can appear permanent on human time scales, but the planet’s solid exterior has not always remained fixed relative to its rotation axis. A new study suggests that the crust and mantle underwent several episodes of relatively rapid reorientation during the past 320 million years. Instead of relying mainly on magnetic signatures preserved in rocks, researchers found evidence in an unexpected archive: ancient changes in where oceans flooded the continents. The study, led by Mathew Domeier at the University …

Scientists recreate Enceladus’s ocean and watch Earth microbes thrive

Scientists recreate Enceladus’s ocean and watch Earth microbes thrive

Published by Jenni Sidey

Laboratory experiments show that a methane-producing archaeon from Earth can grow under simulated Enceladus seafloor conditions at pH values as high as 11, far beyond its previously reported natural range. Water-rock reactions in the experiment produced hydrogen that fueled microbial metabolism, while Enceladus-like concentrations of dissolved inorganic carbon helped the organisms overcome the severe shortage of available carbon dioxide. The results do not show that life exists on Saturn’s moon, but they broaden the conditions considered potentially habitable and strengthen the case for future missions that directly sample Enceladus’s ocean-derived plumes. Beneath the frozen surface of Saturn’s moon Enceladus lies an ocean unlike anything familiar on Earth. It is dark, highly alkaline and separated from space by kilometers of ice, yet its chemistry may be surprisingly accommodating to life. Laboratory experiments now show that an Earth microorganism can grow under conditions designed to reproduce parts of the moon’s hydrothermal seafloor. The microbe survived at pH values reaching 11, producing methane while drawing energy and carbon from reactions involving water, rock, hydrogen and dissolved carbonate. Researchers …

New evidence challenges the idea that Earth and Mars formed the same way

New evidence challenges the idea that Earth and Mars formed the same way

Published by Jenni Sidey

Earth and Mars may have formed through surprisingly different mixtures of pebble accretion, planetesimal collisions and giant impacts, despite growing beside each other in the same young Solar System. Chemical modeling suggests at least 75% of Earth’s mass came from two protoplanets that grew mainly by capturing pebbles, while roughly 73% of Mars came from volatile-depleted planetesimals. The study uses the loss of moderately volatile elements as a record of planetary growth, providing a possible new way to reconstruct the formation and habitability of rocky worlds around other stars. Earth and Mars emerged from the same swirling disk of gas and dust, separated today by less than 80 million kilometers at their closest approach. Their common birthplace might suggest that the two rocky planets were assembled through broadly similar processes. Their chemistry tells a different story. A University of Copenhagen-led study finds that Earth appears to have been built primarily from large protoplanets that themselves grew by sweeping up millimeter- to centimeter-sized pebbles. Mars, by contrast, acquired most of its mass from collisions with much …

The Moon could solve a stubborn GPS navigation problem for satellites around Earth

The Moon could solve a stubborn GPS navigation problem for satellites around Earth

Published by Jenni Sidey

Linking four lunar satellites to China’s BeiDou-3 constellation kept its autonomous navigation solution stable for 60 days, preventing the slow rotational drift that develops when Earth-orbiting satellites rely only on one another. The joint Earth-Moon system held BeiDou’s maximum mean user range error to 0.35 meters, compared with 7.85 meters without rotational correction and 0.60 meters using a conventional prediction-based method. The experiment combined real BeiDou-3 inter-satellite measurements with simulated lunar links, so future missions will need to demonstrate the same performance using actual spacecraft operating around the Moon. A satellite constellation can measure distances between its members with extraordinary precision and still gradually lose track of which way it is pointing. Researchers have now shown how the Moon could solve that problem. A team led by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences connected a simulated four-satellite lunar navigation constellation to 24 operational BeiDou-3 satellites. Over a 60-day experiment, the lunar satellites effectively anchored the orientation of the Earth-orbiting network and prevented the steady drift that otherwise degraded its autonomous navigation accuracy. The study, …

Ancient ocean chemistry may explain how Earth kept its oxygen

Ancient ocean chemistry may explain how Earth kept its oxygen

Published by Jenni Sidey

Earth’s atmosphere did not become oxygen-rich in one clean transition. More than 2 billion years ago, oxygen repeatedly rose and fell as climate, ocean chemistry, microbes and nutrients pushed the planet through major environmental swings. A new study suggests phosphorus played a central role in determining whether those oxygen increases lasted. Researchers from UC Riverside, studying ancient South African rocks, found evidence that changing ocean conditions repeatedly recycled phosphorus into seawater. That nutrient could then support more photosynthetic life, leading to greater production of organic matter. When some of that carbon became buried in sediments instead of decomposing, oxygen remained behind in the atmosphere. The study, published in Nature Communications, combines measurements of different phosphorus pools with sulfur isotopes, redox-sensitive elements and biogeochemical modeling. Together, the evidence reveals a feedback among phosphorus, sulfur, climate and oxygen during one of the most important transitions in Earth’s history. Trends in atmospheric oxygenation and ocean redox conditions are based on Fe-S1 and redox-sensitive trace elements (this study) systematics. (CREDIT: Andrey Bekker et al, Nature Communications 2026) Oxygen rose …