After spending three days about 360 miles above the ground, the all-civilian crew of SpaceX’s Inspiration4 have returned to Earth.The crew kept busy while orbiting the Earth 15 times a day: Isaacman kept track of the spacecraft’s systems and kept in touch with mission control.

This new research, led by Deborah Domingue at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, and Yasuhiro Yokota at Kochi University in Japan, sheds light on Ryugu’s complex structure, revealing it to be a dark, weathered pile of rubble tumbling in space, different from anything seen on the surface of the Earth.

The new evidence reveals the planet’s critical ability to absorb carbon from the atmosphere could have been massively degraded sending global temperatures soaring if we still used ozone-destroying chemicals such as CFCs. New modelling by the international team of scientists from New Zealand, UK and the US, published today in top science journal Nature, paints a dramatic vision of a scorched planet Earth without the Montreal Protocol, what they call the “World Avoided”.

Today, Google announced a new 3D time-lapse feature in its Google Earth platform.Google says the time-lapse feature draws from 20 petabytes of satellite imagery, combined to create a 4.4-terapixel video (that's 4.4 million megapixels) that maps to the surface of the globe.

© Jon Hall / Samantha Hopkins has been studying mountain beaver evolution for years, working and living in their habitat.“Most people don’t know there are these little brown loafs living in forested tunnels and eating ferns,” says Hopkins, a professor of earth sciences at the University of Oregon.

That’s a lot of math in a short amount of time, yet the game pulls it off without ever feeling like you’re doing work.

Now, a study of the rocks from the Australian Outback by Tusch, Münker and their co-authors, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has captured “a snapshot” of the advent of plate tectonics, said Alan Collins, a geologist at the University of Adelaide in Australia.

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed an elaborately decorated, intact four-wheeled ceremonial chariot near the ruins of the Roman city of Pompeii, famously destroyed when Mount Vesuvius catastrophically erupted in 79 CE, BBC News reports.

Photograph: NetgearThe idea behind 4G LTE at home is pretty simple at its core: Deliver internet access to your home in the same way that your phone gets online when it's away from Wi-Fi. If you've ever tried to connect your laptop to a hot spot running from your phone, then you know what's involved, together with all the potential pros (wireless internet access anywhere) and cons (interference and bandwidth issues).

Restoring nature while meeting human needs requires a bold vision, including mainstreaming biodiversity conservation in society.New research presents a Mitigation Hierarchy for mitigating and compensating the biodiversity impacts of developments (1, avoid; 2, minimize; 3, restore; and 4, offset, toward a target such as “no net loss” of biodiversity) within a broader framing encompassing all conservation actions.

A new international study using ancient swamp kauri from Northland shows a temporary breakdown of Earth’s magnetic field 42,000 years ago sparked major climate shifts leading to global environmental change and mass extinctions.

And the experiments get power from a battery that continuously recharges with US-made plutonium fuel .Since July, as Perseverance has been cruising toward Mars, the numerous antennae aboard have been pinging high-frequency signals to engineers back on Earth.

Recently, Genge has been interpreting messages the space dust carries, not about its origins, but about its destination: Earth at different points in the planet’s history.

On February 9, the United Arab Emirates’ Hope spacecraft is expected to enter orbit around Mars after a six-month, 300-million-mile journey from Earth.China’s space agency has been quiet about its plans for visiting the Red Planet, but the craft is expected to attempt a landing shortly after it achieves orbit.

Workers at the site found the entrance to the latest shaft earlier this week as they were preparing to announce a slew of other finds at the site, including the tombs of military leaders and high-ranking courtiers, a copy of the Book of the Dead, and ancient board games.

“They produce this, I think, very eye-catching and also strong message that these two types of stocks—the biomass stock and anthropogenic mass—they are actually at a crossover point more or less in 2020, plus or minus a couple of years,” says social ecologist Fridolin Krausmann of the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, who wasn’t involved in the research but was a peer reviewer for the paper.

Meanwhile, the spent Centaur rocket continued on its merry way through space and was pretty much forgotten—at least until August of this year, when astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System (Pan-STARRS) in Hawaii spotted a mysterious object in a solar orbit that was due to pass close by Earth.

As the first spacecraft to visit a carbonaceous asteroid, Hayabusa2 can help determine the provenance of meteorites discovered on Earth and shed some light on the processes that formed the organic compounds in the early solar system.“Are there samples of the organics that we don’t have in our collection because they didn’t survive going through the atmosphere?

This Showerhead Uses Half the Water You'd Expect ($215, $54 off).Uses about half the water of a normal showerhead.This T-Shirt Helps Support National Parks ($29, $7 off).

“NASA has been very open about the fact that in order to do exploration beyond low earth orbit, you have to have a platform there to test systems and get experience,” says Michael Suffredini, the cofounder and CEO of Axiom Space, a company that is poised to build the world’s first commercial space station.

There are more than a thousand asteroids with diameters larger than Didymos and Dimorphos combined, and if any of those were to strike Earth, it could lead to mass extinction and the collapse of civilization.“Everyone knows it’s possible to hit an asteroid,” says Justin Atchison, a DART mission designer at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory.

Satellites have been capturing all the ways we’ve been transforming this planet, images that authors Benjamin Grant and Timothy Dougherty have compiled into the fascinating new book Overview Timelapse: How We Change the Earth.

High-rise buildings in some parts of Los Angeles may sway four times as much during an earthquake as those in the downtown area, according to a study that reveals new information about how underlying geology transmits a big quake’s power into buildings above.

In fact, China’s push to continue cleaning up its air in the future could warm the entire northern hemisphere by 0.1 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, making it even tougher to keep the Earth’s temperature below the 1.5 Celsius degree (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming limit that scientists say is necessary to avoid severe weather disruptions, increased rainfall, sea level rise, droughts, and other disastrous climate change effects by the year 2100.

Earth Map has also been designed to empower and provide integrative synergies with the federated FAO's Hand-in-Hand geospatial platform , a more comprehensive tool to provide Members, their partners and donors with the means to identify and execute highly-targeted rural development initiatives with multiple goals ranging from climate adaptation and mitigation to socio-economic resilience.

First, there are Mother and Father, two androids dispatched by their creator to raise human children to be pacifist atheists after religious wars destroyed Earth.Campion, a boy raised by Mother and Father on Kepler-22b on a vegan mono diet of tubers (scurvy who?

Geoengineering proposals generally fall into two categories: removing carbon from the atmosphere, or shielding Earth from solar radiation.European and Asian governments support geoengineering in principle, and it now has bipartisan support in the US, which recently approved $4 million for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to assess solar climate interventions.

From a couple thousand feet up in Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator 2020, real-world mapping data from Bing Maps unfurls from the horizon.Mapping tools like Bing’s and Google Earth have long offered enough fidelity that an artist can rely on them to capture far-flung city scenes.

Proactive earthquake alerts will only be in California for now (which already has ShakeAlert and an established data set), and Google says that "over the coming year, you can expect to see the earthquake alerts coming to more states and countries using Android’s phone-based earthquake detection.".

“We see it effectively moving around the globe as a seismic lockdown wave,” says Royal Holloway University of London seismologist Paula Koelemeijer, one of the paper’s coauthors.“Earthquakes are often really lower frequencies than the seismic signals from human activities,” says Koelemeijer.