Every winter, thousands of tourists travel to high-latitude regions like Scandinavia, Canada, and Alaska hoping to see the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights. Vincent Ledvina, an aurora guide and Ph.D. student in space physics at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, estimates he leads 1,000 people on aurora tours each year. Some ask Ledvina how the dazzling curtains of light are created, and he tells them that auroras occur when high-energy particles from space are funneled by Earth’s magnetosphere into the polar atmosphere and collide with different molecules in the air. Ledvina says that more specific questions can be difficult to answer.
CINEMA mission will explore auroras and Earth’s mysterious magnetotail
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Mexico stands at a critical security crossroads following the confirmed death of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, the founder and leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.This post was originally published on this [...]
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American reports of individual well-being have remained relatively stable over decades, but confidence in the nation has sharply declined. James N. Druckman and colleagues analyzed long-term survey data from two projects: the General Social Survey [...]
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The COVID-19 pandemic was a major health crisis that challenged citizens’ information management routines. Epistemic ideals guided how people scanned and filtered information, engaged with it and adapted their behavior accordingly.This post was originally published [...]
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A new study reveals that the image of a seamless global youth climate movement is fracturing as activists in the “periphery” feel increasingly sidelined by Western-centric leadership. By investigating why these local chapters face a [...]
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NLP offers powerful opportunities to support the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—including SDG2 (Zero Hunger). In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia-Ukraine war, mounting climate change impacts, and other crises in the 2020s, [...]
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When the federal government brings its toughest environmental enforcement actions against polluters, they tend to be in communities of greater wealth, not the most polluted places. That’s the takeaway from a new paper co-authored by [...]
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When lawmakers name bills after victims of tragedy—such as Megan’s Law or the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993—public support surges, but this emotional boost may come at the expense of sound policymaking, according [...]
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Turning on the “For You” algorithm on X (formerly Twitter) may shift users’ political opinions toward more conservative views, suggests research involving nearly 5,000 X users. These effects are shown to persist even after users [...]
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For the first time in more than half a century, there are no binding restraints on the buildup of the largest nuclear forces on Earth. The New START treaty expired on Feb. 5, 2026, ending [...]
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Fake news generated by AI is often perceived as more credible than texts written by humans. That worries linguist Silje Susanne Alvestad. In 2017, “fake news” was chosen as the new word of the year [...]
