Pando, a single quaking aspen clone in Utah's Fishlake National Forest, covers 106 acres with 47,000 genetically identical trunks connected by one root system — and weighs an estimated 6,000 tonnes.
NASA's Parker Solar Probe now skims to within 6.1 million kilometres of the Sun at 692,000 km/h — fast enough to cross the United States in 20 seconds — protected by a carbon-composite heat shield just 11.4 centimetres thick.
A typical fair-weather cumulus holds around 500 tonnes of water — the mass of 100 elephants — dispersed as trillions of 20-micron droplets held aloft by rising warm air. Here is the physics, and what a new centimetre-scale lidar just revealed about cloud tops.
On 18 August 1868, French astronomer Pierre Janssen watched a solar eclipse from Guntur, India and caught a yellow spectral line that belonged to no known element. Helium existed only in the Sun for 27 years before William Ramsay finally found it in a Norwegian uranium mineral in 1895 — making it the only element in the periodic table discovered off-world first.
Mangroves cover less than one percent of the tropics but store three to four times more carbon per hectare than inland rainforests. The reason sits under the trees, not in them: waterlogged, oxygen-starved peat that can hold organic carbon for thousands of years.
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