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This week in science news, we saw SpaceX rockets punching temporary holes in our planet's atmosphere, heard about new technology for smart glasses that use sonar, and learned of the incredible sleeping patterns of chinstrap penguins.
It seems like not a week goes by without another SpaceX launch, but this time, it's not what goes up but what happens when it comes back down. Deorbiting SpaceX rockets appear to be smashing temporary holes in the upper atmosphere by releasing fuel into the ionosphere, creating bright blobs of light in the sky. Scientists now think these "SpaceX auroras" could be causing unrecognized problems.
When we're not punching holes in the atmosphere, Earth is happily making its own in the planet's crust, with the new "baby volcano" off Japan erupting in spectacular fashion, while a big blob of hot water in the Pacific is making this year's El Niño act a little weird.
Speaking of blobs, there's a strange one circling the Milky Way's central black hole. It's shooting powerful radiation at Earth every 76 minutes — and we might finally know what it is.
And finally, in the animal kingdom, chinstrap penguins have taken the idea of a breeze snooze to the extreme. They sleep for a perfectly reasonable 11 hours a day, but as their breeding colonies contain tens of thousands of individuals, they must remain constantly vigilant against threats to their nests from predatory skua birds and hostile colony neighbors. So how do they pack in all those hours? Every day, they take 10,000 micro sleeps lasting up to four seconds long.
The world's largest iceberg, A23a, is on the move after being trapped in place off Antarctica's coastline for almost 40 years. The gigantic "ice island," which is three times the size of New York City, will likely drift into the "iceberg graveyard," potentially putting it on a collision course with an important penguin refuge before the ice fractures and melts away.
An HIV diagnosis hasn't been a death sentence for years, thanks to powerful medications. Despite incredible progress, however, HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) remains a global public health threat, with 1.3 million new infections and around half that many deaths in 2022 alone.
While new HIV infections have dropped steadily since their peak in 1995, as people live longer with the disease, the pool of people who are HIV-positive has only grown. People with HIV must consistently take medications to prevent the virus from becoming transmissible again or progressing to AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). As a result, new infections could actually rebound fast if the world doesn't dramatically ramp up the number of people being regularly treated, tested and protected from new HIV infections.
But we could head off that rebound risk by the end of the decade, experts say. Here's how we could end the AIDS epidemic once and for all.
Alexander McNamara is the Editor-in-Chief at Live Science, and has more than 15 years’ experience in publishing at digital titles. In 2024 he was shortlisted for Editor of the Year at the Association of British Science Writers awards for his work at Live Science. He has previously worked at New Scientist and BBC Science Focus.
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