Science Capsules

Most plastic tossed in the recycling bin never becomes anything new, and the reasons are contested. These reasons range from misleading resin codes and the false promise of chemical recycling to the systemic changes and proven programs that do work. You can decide which fixes would genuinely improve where your plastic ends up.

Shopping bags carry environmental costs across production, transport, reuse, disposal, and recycling. This summary explains how plastic, paper, cotton, and reusable bags compare across their lifecycles, why reuse habits often matter more than material choice alone, and how to make greener decisions at checkout and at home.

Humanity achieves true immortality not by extending individual life indefinitely but by ensuring the survival of the species beyond Earth’s eventual demise. This requires overcoming the prohibitive costs of space travel through fully reusable rockets, which reduce launch expenses by up to 2.5 orders of magnitude and enable sustainable colonization of Mars and beyond. By producing propellant on Mars via in-situ resource utilization and implementing orbital refueling, missions become economically feasible, transforming space settlement from a heroic rarity into a routine extension of civilization.

Ice sheets, ocean currents, and cloud physics could shift Earth's climate faster than the smooth curves in most projections. The findings diverge on how close those tipping points are, how much to trust the models that predict them, and how finance and policy should price risks that arrive suddenly rather than gradually. What you take from them shapes how urgent, and how hedged, you think climate decisions need to be.