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Space is brutal.

In a vivid cosmic image captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, two galaxies are shown after what is almost certainly a dramatic deep space collision. On right is the dazzling galaxy NGC 2445, surrounded by vivid bursts of star formation. On left is the less brilliant, but still powerful NGC 2444.

What happened?

“Astronomers suggest that the galaxies passed through each other, igniting the uniquely shaped star-formation firestorm in NGC 2445, where thousands of stars are bursting to life on the right-hand side of the image,” NASA explained.

Yes, they struck each other, but then, like apparitions, traveled through one another (over millions of years). The ancient impact stoked those vivid outer bands of stellar activity around NGC 2445.

“Simulations show that head-on collisions between two galaxies is one way of making rings of new stars,” astronomer Julianne Dalcanton of the Flatiron Institute’s Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York and the University of Washington in Seattle, said in a statement.

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This galactic collision left a “weird” aftermath, explained Dalcanton. There’s an uncanny triangle of star formation, as opposed to a ring, around the galaxy NGC 2445. That’s because the galaxy NGC 2444 still has ample mass and is tugging on the galaxy NGC 2445.

“So they’re not completely free of each other yet, and their unusual interaction is distorting the ring into this triangle,” said Dalcanton.

You can spot this tugging in action. Between the two galaxies is a bridge of “taffy-like strands of gas,” notes NASA. The galaxy NGC 2444 is ripping mass from NGC 2445.

The cosmic evolution — collisions, transformation, and birth — continues apace.

Over a trillion exoplanets likely orbit distant stars in our humble galaxy. Astronomers suspect one, 855 light-years away, harbors metallic clouds and raining gems.

This peculiar world, WASP-121 b is known as a “hot Jupiter,” because it’s a gaseous giant that orbits close to its searing star. Crucially, the planet is tidally locked to its star — like the moon is locked to Earth — meaning that one side of WASP-121 b is incessantly seared by its sun, while the other is dark and cooler.

In new research published by the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists demonstrate that airborne metals and gems exist on the planet’s cooler side. (The intensely hot, 3,000 degree-Celsius, or over 5,400-degree Fahrenheit, dayside evaporates such clouds.) Using unique observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers measured the temperature of the nightside atmosphere and showed that it was cool enough for various metals to condense, Thomas Mikal-Evans, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and a lead author of the research, told Mashable. The detected metals on WASP-121 b include magnesium, iron, vanadium, chromium, and nickel.

It’s currently rare, and challenging, for astronomers to probe the atmospheres of distant exoplanets. In this case, the team used a clever observational method to glimpse the make-up of WASP-121 b’s upper atmosphere. Hubble watched the planet orbit its star, and was able to analyze the sunlight that passed through the atmosphere, which ultimately reveals some of the chemicals present.

Even on the “cool” side, temperatures hover at 1,500 degrees Celsius, or some 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s much too hot for water clouds, like Earth’s. But metals in a gaseous state will condense in such environments. What might such unusual clouds look like?

“I don’t think we can say what they’d look like for sure, because cloud formation is complicated and we don’t have clouds like these to observe up close in our own solar system,” Mikal-Evans said over email.

“I don’t know what the clouds would look like for sure, but it’s fun to speculate.”

But he suspects the metallic clouds could potentially resemble dust storms that form on Earth, as seen in this YouTube video. As for the clouds’ color, it’s also speculation. But why not speculate? The researchers suspect WASP-121 b contains aluminum, which condenses into the mineral corundum. Ruby and sapphire are made of corundum, along with other trace chemicals (also likely on WASP-121 b) that provide these gems their rich colors. Fine droplets of ruby and sapphire may form clouds. “So perhaps some of the clouds would have red and blue coloration,” Mikal-Evans mused.

Other clouds might be beige. Others grey or green. “As I said, I don’t know what the clouds would look like for sure, but it’s fun to speculate,” Mikal Evans said.

An artist’s conception of the exoplanet WASP-121 b, which orbits close to its sun.
Credit: Patricia Klein / MPIA

Like on Earth, when conditions are right, metallic droplets in the clouds will condense enough to rain, in spectacular form.

“Liquid gems could therefore be raining on the nightside hemisphere of WASP-121 b,” the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy noted in a press release.

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Exoplanet research, already fascinating, is about to be revolutionized.

The James Webb Space Telescope — the most powerful space telescope ever built — successfully launched into space and arrived at its home, nearly 1 million miles from Earth. Its science mission will begin this summer, and considerable time (one-quarter of its first year) will be spent observing the atmospheres of exoplanets. We’ll learn unprecedented things. The Webb telescope can see more light than Hubble, and detect molecules that Hubble can’t see.

Crucially, Webb will peer at smaller planets, like rocky planets around twice the size of Earth, and see if they contain the ingredients for life (as we know it). This includes water, carbon dioxide, and methane.

“We’re going to be able to tell what [the planets] are made of,” Mercedes López-Morales, an exoplanet researcher and astrophysicist at Center for Astrophysics-Harvard & Smithsonian, told Mashable.

Stay tuned. We already know the galaxy contains wild exoplanets almost certainly hosting otherworldly clouds. What else will we find in distant solar systems?

Twitter’s 2021 test of user-added content warnings was apparently a success. The feature is now live.

The company confirmed on Friday that Twitter users accessing the social media platform on Android, iOS, and the web can now add content warnings to any photos or videos attached to their tweets. It’s a relatively simple process that forces anyone who wants to take a look at your posted media to manually click past a prompt first.

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It’s not a perfect implementation at this point. The content warning doesn’t show up when a tweet that has one is embedded. The warnings also aren’t visible in third-party Twitter apps — I use Tweetdeck and they’re not showing up there.

Still, the process of adding a content warning is easy enough. And the feature should improve over time. Here’s how to take advantage.

Create your tweet, attach any media

Yeah, the tweet comes first. Don’t post it yet, but create your tweet. Add whatever media you plan to use. Then click or tap the “Edit” button to open up Twitter’s built-in editing tools.

The “Edit” button is what you’re looking for here.
Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable

Click the content warning icon

Once the Twitter edit tools pop up, look near the top of the window. You should see a few different tabs. The default one is for cropping and resizing, as indicated by the crop icon. The middle one, labeled “ALT,” is for alt text, a basic description of the contents of whatever media you’re sharing. Alt text is used by screen readers to help those who may not be able to see the media you’re sharing know what’s there.

In this case, though, the third icon is the one we want. It looks like a little flag.

You’ve got three types of warning tags to choose from.
Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable

Select your warning

Clicking or tapping the flag icon opens up the content warning tab. You’ll quickly notice there are three options to choose from here: Nudity, Violence, or Sensitive.

Choose whichever one is most appropriate for your media share, this appears to be the user’s prerogative. So if you want to, say, stick a spoiler-y movie clip behind a content warning, the lack of a “spoiler” tag doesn’t mean any of the others is the “wrong” choice. Your best bet is to go with “sensitive” in any situation where the thing you want to share isn’t an easy fit in any of the categories.

You get to see your content warning before it’s live.
Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable

You can select multiple warnings if you want. Once you check one of the boxes, the editing tools’ preview window shows you what the warning will actually look like once it’s live. Once you’ve got your warning set, click or tap “Save” and you’ll be taken back to the original post editor.

Publish your tweet

At this point, you should be done and ready to publish your tweet (unless there’s more you want to add). So do that. Anyone who looks at your post on Twitter official, whether it’s the app or browser interface, will see a warning in front of your media just like it appeared in the preview.

The live version of the warning is identical to the preview version, as you can see here.
Credit: Screenshot by Adam Rosenberg / Mashable

At a Christie’s auction, bids on a scrappy dog house did what a meteorite had done three years ago: They went through the roof.

The rusty, corrugated tin shelter — with a gaping seven-inch hole on top — went for $44,100 earlier this week, more than double the amount fetched by the extraterrestrial rock that blasted through it. Meanwhile, an extremely rare auction lot — billed as the third-largest Martian rock on Earth and valued at up to $800,000 — failed to find a buyer when the sale closed on Feb. 23.

The dog house’s sale may reveal something about what drives private collectors to possess the rare objects that fall to Earth from outer space. Beyond their ancient ages and the distance they’ve traveled is the notion of a close call: Something unexpected and otherworldly fell from the sky, and, in doing so, showed its potential for destruction.

In some cases, the reminder of that power is more valuable than the rubble itself.

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“It’s incredibly unlikely for [a meteorite] to actually hit something that’s in our day-to-day lives.”

“It’s incredibly unlikely for [a meteorite] to actually hit something that’s in our day-to-day lives,” James Hyslop, head of scientific instruments, globes, and natural history at Christie’s, told Mashable.

The story behind the dog house began at 9:07 p.m. on April 23, 2019, according to its record in the Meteoritical Bulletin, a publication of peer-reviewed meteorites. That night, a meteorite shower pelted a rainforest in central Costa Rica. Cameras at the summits of volcanoes captured the fireball, an unusually bright meteor. A chunk weighing close to two-thirds of a pound crashed into a German shepherd’s abode. Coincidentally, his name was “Roky.”

The Brazilian Meteors Observation Network, University of Sao Paulo, and Sao Paulo State University figured out the trajectory of the meteorite, dubbed “Arguas Zarcas,” by reviewing four security videos and dashcam cameras.

A note to concerned dog lovers: Roky survived the ordeal in better shape than his house.

Roky, a German Shepherd in Costa Rica, wasn’t injured by a meteorite that crashed into his dog house in 2019.
Credit: Christie’s

Appraising these astronomical objects at auction has more to do with a gut feeling, Hyslop admits. The only data Christie’s had to guide it was a meteorite-dented mailbox from Claxton, Georgia, that sold for $83,000 in 2007.

A few years ago, Hyslop attended a meteorite exhibition in Paris. Outside in a glass box was a Chevy Malibu that had been struck by the Peekskill meteorite in 1992.

“I just thought that was such a great bit of theater,” he said. “It’s not just these meteorites that capture our minds. I mean, we all know the story of the asteroid that crashed into Earth and caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. The impact that a meteorite has is a part of the story.”

“I just thought that was such a great bit of theater.”

A meteorite struck a Chevy Malibu in 1992.
Credit: Ingo Wagner dpa / Picture Alliance / Getty Images

Scientists estimate that about 48.5 tons of billions-of-years-old meteor material rain down on the planet daily, much of which vaporizes in Earth’s atmosphere or falls into the ocean, which covers over 70 percent of the planet.

Over 60,000 meteorites have been discovered on Earth. The vast majority come from asteroids, but a small sliver, about 0.2 percent, come from Mars or the moon, according to NASA. At least 126 have been identified as originating from the Red Planet.

In order for meteorites to get formally documented, the owner must give a large piece of it to an internationally authorized institution, such as a natural history museum. The institution will cut off a piece to preserve for enduring scientific research.

“The impact that a meteorite has is a part of the story.”

An “Aguas Zarcas” space rock that smashed into a dog house sold at auction for $21,420 on Feb. 23, 2022.
Credit: Christie’s

Christie’s auctioned a piece of Roky’s rock that weighed half as much as the weight recorded in the Meteoritical Bulletin. The meteorite is mostly covered in a fusion crust, caused by its fiery descent through Earth’s atmosphere. Its front face features a reddish-brown streak from when it crashed through the oxidized tin roof. The meteorite, composed of carbon compounds, sold for $21,420.

When Hyslop saw the unique remnants of the Costa Rican crash in the gallery, he thought it looked like an art installation.

“For me, it fits very comfortably alongside some very cool contemporary artworks of the moment,” he said.

Over the last few years, there’s been hand-wringing over (young) people not having sex anymore. The latest came on Valentine’s Day, when CNN declared Americans are “less likely to have sex…than ever.”

Twenty-six percent of American adults didn’t have sex at all in 2021, according to the latest General Social Survey (GSS), a national representative survey of American adults released most years since 1972. While COVID certainly didn’t help matters of physical touch, the trend is in line with pre-pandemic levels. In 2016 and 2018, the last two times the survey was conducted, 23 percent of people reported not having sex at all.

Are we really having less sex than ever? It’s impossible to tell in a few data points. If you find yourself in the sexless category and want to climb out of it, though, there are ways to do so.

Consider the data

As always when looking at survey numbers, be mindful that even a nationally representative sample won’t illustrate what each and every person is going through. When looking at the actual breakdown of the 2021 GSS data, for example, the hard number of people telling GSS they haven’t had sex in the last 12 months is 633 out of 4,032. In fact, 46 percent of participants (1,875) either didn’t have an applicable answer, said they didn’t know, or plain didn’t answer that question.

That doesn’t mean we should disregard these findings entirely, though. The GSS is far from the only survey to suggest people, particularly Millennials and Gen Z, are having less sex.

One statistic doesn’t tell the whole story, however, and also doesn’t dive into the reasons behind it. 

Why are we having less sex?

Sex educator and author of Beyond Satisfied: A Sex Hacker’s Guide to Endless Orgasms, Mind-Blowing Connection, and Lasting Confidence Kenneth Play suspects that as our online lives become richer, our ability to connect IRL diminishes. “This trend has already been catapulting with every new device and dating app,” he told Mashable. “Coupled with pandemic lockdown, we now have a recipe for loneliness and disconnection.”

Prior to his current career, Play was a personal trainer. He discovered that he wasn’t competing with other fitness businesses; he competed with the entertainment industry. It’s much easier, for instance, to binge Netflix than to drag yourself to a gym.

“We have too many options that compete for our attention in this hyper-convenient society,” he said. “It makes social connection more of a chore than ever before.”

Combine our hyper-convenient society with the stressors of a pandemic and the busyness of modern life, and it makes sense that we’re having less sex. 

Still, people may desire sex even if they’re not having it. According to dating site eharmony’s latest Happiness Index, a nationally representative survey of 3,000 people, 41 percent of singles reported that their libido is higher now than pre-pandemic. 

Play, a “sex hacker” who coaches clients on how to improve sex and intimacy, said he’s getting more requests than ever for help in the bedroom.

Stephen Quaderer, creator of the inclusive app for people who love oral pleasure Headero, said the influx of 20,000 users on the app since July 202 is a counterpoint to these statistics. 

“Within the Headero community we’re seeing a very different picture than the broader societal trend,” said Quaderer. “People are coming to Headero to seek out sexual exploration and experimentation – and based on the feedback that we’ve received, they’re finding it.”

Quaderer believes Headero’s growth and the sexless trends actually have something in common. The reason the app is growing is because it’s a safe space for people to be honest with their intentions and desires while grounding in safety and consent, he said. Meanwhile, in broader society, sex is increasingly framed from the prospective of stigma, so people don’t interrogate or act on their desires.

This is certainly true of social media companies, which are our current communication hubs. Tech giants are increasingly prudish due to legislation like FOSTA-SESTA, which set out to curb sex trafficking but in reality is just pushing sex workers — and discussions of sex — to the margins. 

As University of Toronto pornography platform Ph.D. student Maggie MacDonald told Mashable, sexuality is just one social element that we like to connect with others about. On our main methods of digital communication, however, we’re not allowed to express this side of ourselves. This stifling of online sexual content — combined with a concerning lack of sexual education in schools — can bleed into our sex lives because if we’re not talking about it on the internet then we may not be talking about it at all. Porn, which is stylized entertainment, becomes the de facto rulebook to sex.

Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok don’t allow sexual content. While Twitter does, some users (like sex workers) claim they’re shadowbanned (when one’s account remains up but their content is blocked from others seeing it). 

Sexuality is policed online by both the U.S. government and by the platforms themselves. But what if you want to have more IRL intimacy and don’t know where to start?

How to have more sex

While we alone can’t solve the erasure of sexuality online  — or the pandemic, or the hamster wheel of late-stage capitalism — there are small, actionable steps individuals can take to have more sex,

Play’s first suggestion is to schedule it. “I know, it sounds kind of lame,” he said, “but one of the key findings in sex research is that responsive desire produces far greater results in getting people in the mood.” Responsive desire is getting horny after external stimulation, like someone touching you. Spontaneous desire is getting horny with or without stimulation…in other words, spontaneously. 

Transitioning from a stressful day to a sensual partner session can be challenging, Play acknowledged. He suggested creating a transition ritual to get in an erotic headspace. An easy sex hack? Take a sensual shower with your partner.

“The goal is to caress each other’s bodies slowly and focus on the awakening sensations in your body,” Play said. “As a bonus you also get clean and smell great for all the dirty fun ahead!”

Quaderer advises folks to educate themselves beyond “the birds and the bees.” Read about communication, and of course consent and safety. Learning more about sex won’t just make you a more understanding and empathetic lover, but will also ground your own value system about sex, said Quaderer. 

Questions to ask yourself are: What matters to you? What conditions must be met before sex?  What boundaries cannot be crossed? 

“Sex is complex, and it can be confusing,” Quaderer said, “so having a firm set of personal sexual values can help you navigate that complexity as it arises.” Knowing what you value out of sex can help you determine if a partner is right for you, and what desires you want to explore. 

Once you have firm boundaries and desires, you can seek out communities of like minded people. Quaderer suggested his own app, Headero, and there are others out there like sexual exploration app Feeld and polyamorous community app Bloom.

The sex data is bleak, but it’s not a life sentence. If we carve out time to be with our partner — or ourselves — and determine our sexual values, we can bunk the trend.

As a sophomore in college, I was on Tumblr every minute that I wasn’t in class or watching YouTube. And as a fan of One Direction, I couldn’t avoid the platform’s No. 1 ship of 2015: Larry Stylinson, the pairing of band members Harry Styles and Louis Tomlinson. Larry supporters scoured videos of the group for “evidence” of their romance — a lingering gaze, a gentle brush of an arm — and transformed those moments into GIFs that were reblogged tens of thousands of times. 

At first, I found the conviction of Larry truthers fascinating. And then something strange happened: I began to believe in Larry, too.

Larry content was everywhere, blooming across photo edits, blog posts, fan art, and fanfiction. However, it was the GIFs that did me in. They re-framed a fleeting moment as significant, as romantic, then suspended it in time. Scholars Dr. Dominik Maeder and Dr. Daniela Wentz have written that in a GIF’s “infinite loops of human and animal gesture… meaning eventually surfaces.” For me, and for many Larry shippers, that was true. Styles and Tomlinson denied the romance, but the hypnotic carousel of their small, silent moments made it feel completely possible, maybe even real.

Kayla, who now works as a social media consultant in the entertainment industry and requested we change her name to maintain her anonymity, used to make shipping edits of Arrow‘s Olicity (Oliver and Felicity) and The Old Guard‘s Joe and Nicky. GIFs were her way of showing others something she saw that they might not have picked up on. “When you slow these things down, you’re noticing smaller moments that you didn’t see live, that you wouldn’t see otherwise,” she explains. “That’s really special when you’re talking about romanticizing these couples and their chemistry. It increases the investment of fans in that relationship because they can see it in a new way.” Fans share those interpretations through creative edits, sometimes leveling up a romance to be on par with a Disney love story or the fiery passion of The Notebook‘s Allie and Noah or the tragedy of Titanic.

[GIFs] re-framed a fleeting moment as significant, as romantic, then suspended it in time.

During her time on Tumblr from 2014 to 2018, Kayla mostly posted sets: collections of GIFs or photos that capture shorter frames of a larger moment, like storyboards. Sets were native to Tumblr, and have now been co-opted by fans on Twitter. “With GIF sets you break the moment down a lot more to see the evolution of it in a way that encapsulates almost all of the emotion or all the chemistry.” They can also capture dialogue exchanges that are too long for a single GIF. “Sets to me are a little bit more emotional, a little bit more palpable,” she says “and I think really tugged at the heartstrings of the moment more than a single GIF would.”

In a 2013 interview, Tumblr’s founder and then-CEO David Karp called this kind of GIF editing and remixing “a really clear example” of a way that Tumblr gave creators “room to do something that they couldn’t really do anywhere else.” In contrast to nascent social platforms of the day, which he said had “gotten more and more restricted — [with] square photos, 140 characters, six-second videos,” Tumblr gave creativity a “place to flourish. We didn’t want to define the medium,” he says, “we wanted to leave it wide open.”

According to researchers Kate M. Miltner and Tim Highfield, the GIF is “an ideal tool for enhancing” what they call “the performance of affect” or the way we process and react to experiences. Basically, GIFs are like stand-ins for our own experiences, allowing us to analyze, replay, and potentially portray the actions they depict.

This is especially significant for queer communities on Tumblr. Other academics suggest that while sharing GIFs are the “smallest and most innocuous of Tumblr practices,” for LGBTQ users specifically, GIFs are a way to “trade in affect across the site.”

“Millennials kind of paved the way for queerness on the internet, and a lot of it happened through Tumblr,” says Amanda Brennan, who dug into the data behind Tumblr’s fandoms over her seven years at the company. “The way that we talk about gender and sexuality now wouldn’t be here if Tumblr hadn’t laid that path. It’s a space where you could be yourself and support each other, and the queer community is the cornerstone.” And GIFs can be a vehicle for discovery in the same way that “we use memes as a way to talk about things that we may or may not want to be vulnerable about,” she says.

That visibility helps queer users see themselves in stories historically centered on heterosexual relationships, and celebrate their identity.

Brennan points to data from 2013 showing that more than 76 percent of the most reblogged ships on Tumblr were slash, or same-sex pairings. That visibility helps queer users see themselves in stories historically centered on heterosexual relationships, and celebrate their identity. It’s important “to be able to see these queer relationships and queer joy when you’re just trying to figure yourself out,” to be able to say, “‘I see the way this person looks at this person. And I know that feeling and I’m going to dive into it because it brings me joy.'”

GIFs capture these ephemeral moments in a way that is immense and interminable. A GIF lives on in perpetuity, as eternal as love itself. Brennan points to one of her favorite femslash ships: Waverly Earp and Nicole Haught (Wayhaught) of Wynonna Earp. “I love seeing love, wherever it is,” she gushes, “Like, fuck yeah, I want to look at every GIF of the way that Nicole gives Waverly heart eyes.”

Climate 101 is a Mashable series that answers provoking and salient questions about Earth’s warming climate.

The oceans are the true keeper of climate change.

Earth’s seas soak up over 90 percent of the heat humanity is now trapping on the planet, a nearly an unfathomable amount of energy that expands the oceans. And as Earth’s ice sheets and glaciers melt in a hotter world, this new water inevitably pours into the seas.

Since the late 19th century, sea levels have already risen by some eight to nine inches. But much more sea level rise is imminent, because the planet has warmed significantly over the last hundred years. In a new report authored by top researchers at a diversity of U.S. agencies — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), NASA, the Department of Defense, and beyond — scientists project sea levels will rise by some 10 inches to a foot along the U.S. coast over just the next three decades.

In a hotter world, seas are rising faster. “Over the last 50 years, there’s been an acceleration,” William Sweet, a NOAA oceanographer and one of the report’s lead authors, told Mashable.

And after 2050, the waters will continue rising. Crucially, how much more is contingent upon how much society heats the planet by burning ancient, decomposed deposits of carbon-rich organisms (stored underground as fossil fuels). Already, heat-trapping CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest they’ve been in some 3 million years. Sea levels could rise an additional foot and a half this century, or multiple feet.

“The ice sheets are just getting warmed up.”

Melting from Earth’s massive ice sheets, which blanket Greenland and Antarctica, will figure prominently in the coming decades.

“The ice sheets are just getting warmed up,” Josh Willis, a NASA oceanographer not involved with the report, told Mashable.

How we know sea levels are rising

Satellites have revolutionized our ability to measure changing sea levels.

That’s because the sprawling oceans — influenced by the likes of varying temperatures, geography, ocean currents, and tides in disparate places — make it enormously difficult to measure how seas are changing globally. But satellites in space, like NASA’s Jason-3, beam radio waves to the ocean surface that bounce back to the satellite. This gives oceanographers a precise recording of sea surface height over wide swathes of the ocean.

An extensive system of tide gauges confirms what satellites like Jason-3 record from space. There are other stark indicators, too. Along much of the U.S. coastline, high-tide flooding is now 300 to over 900 percent more frequent than it was 50 years ago, notes NOAA. It’s also why an octopus washed into a Miami parking garage amid a high tide event. The totality of the evidence is clear.

“We know the ocean is rising,” said NOAA’s Sweet.

Sea level rise each year more than doubled from 1.4 millimeters over most of the 20th century, to 3.6 millimeters by the early 21st century. From just the years 2013 to 2018, that number accelerated to 4.8 millimeters per year.

Sea level rise between 1993 to present, as measured by satellites.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Why scientists expect sea levels to rise significantly

In the coming decades, two factors will largely drive rising sea levels around the U.S., and the globe.

1. Thermal expansion: As the seas absorb more heat, they expand. The oceans have warmed each year for decades, and in 2021 the ocean “was the hottest ever recorded by humans,” scientists concluded in a major study. Historically, thermal expansion has been responsible for one-third of sea level rise.

2. Melting ice sheets and glaciers: Globally, nearly all mountain glaciers are shrinking. You might consider glimpsing them while you can. Much of this glacial water ultimately enters the ocean. Separately, the colossal ice stores on Greenland and Antarctica are melting into the sea, too. The reasons for this are numerous: Warming air directly melts Greenland’s ice. Warming oceans also melt the ends of Greenland’s glaciers. In Antarctica, a warmer atmosphere is ultimately driving warmer seawater beneath the ends of gigantic Antarctic glaciers. This has destabilized them and amplified ice loss.

   Just how much ice have the ice sheets lost? A prodigious amount. Satellites beam lasers onto the great remote ice sheets to document their mass. The Greenland Ice Sheet, about three times the size of Texas, lost some 200 gigatons annually between 2003 and 2019. (A gigaton equals 1 billion metric tonnes.) Meanwhile, Antarctica, a continent whose mountains are up to their necks in ice, lost some 118 gigatons each year.

Melting ice sheets and glaciers have accounted for two-thirds of sea level rise. But in the coming years, ice sheets will play a larger role. There’s considerably more ice to melt.

How thermal expansion and added water mass (from ice sheets and glaciers) add up to significant sea level rise.
Credit: NASA

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NOAA’s Sweet, an author of the sea level rise report, has strong confidence in the sea level rise projections over the next few decades. That’s because the graphed trajectory of how sea levels will rise, based on the reality that rates have observably increased, matches with careful computer simulations, or models, of how sea levels will rise.

“That’s two lines of evidence pointing to similar numbers,” Sweet explained.

But beyond 2050, the trajectory of the climate, and oceans, is more uncertain, and largely dependent on the most unpredictable part of the climate equation. That’s us.

So the new sea level rise report created five different potential sea level futures between 2050 and 2150, based upon how much heat-trapping carbon global civilization adds to the atmosphere this century. (These five emissions scenarios were made, and deeply vetted, by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)

It may sound awfully pessimistic to hear that sea levels will inevitably continue to rise past 2050. These ideas can fuel doomism and helplessness about our climatic future. But climate scientists emphasize that such doomist notions are misguided. Rather, it shows we still have enormous sway over how much the climate warms — and the seas rise — later this century. “We have a significant amount of influence over how much warmer it gets,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute, previously told Mashable.

We still have enormous sway over how much the climate warms — and the seas rise — later this century.

The following five long-term (2050-2150) sea level rise scenarios cover a wide range of possibilities. The “low” scenario — involving an extremely ambitious climate target — requires global nations stabilizing Earth’s warming at some around 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8 degrees Fahrenheit) above 19th-century temperature levels by mid-century.

Compared to sea levels in 2000, the “Intermediate” scenario for the U.S. below, which projects 1.3 feet of sea level rise by 2050 and several feet by 2100, is a world warmed by around 2 C by mid-century.

Five potential sea level rise scenarios for both the U.S. and the globe.
Credit: NOAA 2022 Sea Level Rise Technical Report

Crucially, there are looming unknowns about how much ice sheets will respond to different amounts of warming later this century. (This is OK and expected: These scenarios are a “what if” guide.) That’s because Earth’s current, rapid warming is historically unprecedented. Humanity, and earth scientists, have never witnessed Greenland and Antarctica continually melt.

“We haven’t watched these ice sheets melt before,” said Willis. “The last time they did it was 20,000 years ago and we weren’t paying attention.”

“We haven’t watched these ice sheets melt before.”

The geologic record shows that our great ice sheets have experienced major ice loss in the past. During a warm period some 125,000 years ago, massive amounts of ice on Antarctica melted, raising sea levels by some six to nine meters. Fortunately, oceanographers don’t think that type of melting will happen suddenly (think a process unfolding over hundreds of years). But that process could begin, perhaps this century.

Already, Antarctica’s Florida-sized Thwaites Glacier has destabilized. “Thwaites is the one spot in Antarctica that has the potential to dump an enormous amount of water into the ocean over the next decades,” Sridhar Anandakrishnan, a professor of glaciology at Penn State University, told Mashable in 2020. Anandakrishnan is a veteran researcher of this threatening, remote glacier.

Yet amid some future uncertainty, substantial sea level rise is still certain. Some 10 inches to a foot is due around the U.S. by 2050. That portends lots of American flooding.

“By 2050, moderate flooding ⁠— which is typically disruptive and damaging by today’s weather, sea level and infrastructure standards ⁠— is expected to occur more than 10 times as often as it does today,” Nicole LeBoeuf, NOAA’s National Ocean Service Director, said in a statement.

This is not ideal. But, importantly, Willis emphasized that we can limit significantly worse flooding if we slash our emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. Nothing else is going to blunt sea level rise. The world isn’t going to suddenly cool on its own.

“There are no big natural cycles that will save us,” he said.

Every year, children and their parents seek medical care for tics. These involuntary, repetitive verbal expressions and physical behaviors are often caused by the neurologic condition Tourette syndrome. Typically, symptoms begin when children are between the ages of five and seven. Boys are more likely to be diagnosed with the condition.

But during the pandemic, physicians around the world noticed something unusual: Adolescent and teen girls began showing up in emergency departments exhibiting tics that developed seemingly out of nowhere and were not related to Tourette syndrome. Doctors shared details with each other about the surprising phenomenon and took note of something even stranger. Patients had picked up the same tics, regardless of where they lived. They repeated random words or phrases, like “flying shark,” “beans,” and “woo-hoo,” in addition to saying the same obscenities. They clapped their hands and pointed their fingers, and hit or banged parts of their body as well as other people or objects.

The doctors soon identified a common thread tying these cases together: viewing of viral TikTok videos featuring creators with Tourette syndrome. The #tourettes hashtag on the social media platform has 5.5 billion views.

Sleuthing by doctors offered some insights about the phenomenon, but the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently published data illustrating its scale. The mean number of weekly visits to the ER for tics skyrocketed for adolescent girls from about a dozen prior to the pandemic to 85 at its peak in 2021. While that number began to decline toward the end of the year, it surged at the start of 2022. In general, the proportion of visits for tic disorders tripled during the pandemic. Visits for children’s mental health conditions, like anxiety, disordered eating, and obsessive-compulsive disorders, rose markedly during the same time. The CDC noted in its report that pandemic stress or exposure to severe tics on platforms like TikTok might explain the unexpected cases.

Dr. Mohammed Aldosari, a pediatric neurologist and director of the Cleveland Clinic’s Center for Pediatric Neurosciences, says it’s critical to offer teens, parents, and caregivers reassurance that such tics are treatable, and rarely a symptom of a more dangerous or life-threatening disorder.

“Mostly this is an expression of extreme stress, whether it’s recognized or unrecognized by the parents,” says Aldosari, who has treated patients experiencing the sudden onset of tics during the pandemic. “Something is stressing this young teenager.”

What causes tics in children?

Along with other experts, Aldosari believes social media may be the catalyst for the sudden onset of tics, rather than the cause. In one published account of the phenomenon, from November 2020, doctors in the United Kingdom described a 14-year-old girl with no history of tics who started exhibiting complex head turns, neck thrusting, and flailing, along with making yelping noises, the day after a COVID-19 lockdown announcement. The restrictions, changes to routine, social media exposure and bullying, and pandemic-related stress all factored into the girl’s diagnosis.

The doctors wrote that stress may be unmasking a predisposition to tics in some patients. For others, it could be compounding existing vulnerability to anxiety, or other underlying neurological and emotional difficulties, to the point where patients become totally overwhelmed.

Aldosari says that for some people stress can trigger a movement disorder, including the types of involuntary tics that are not caused by Tourette syndrome. In such cases, the brain is trying to physically express a feeling of overwhelm. It makes sense that teens, many of whom couldn’t find social and athletic outlets for stress during periods of the pandemic, might experience tics as a result. The most vulnerable teens might also be susceptible to viral videos of young people demonstrating their tics or tic-like behaviors and then unwittingly adopt them, says Aldosari.

How to help a child with tics

Youth who experience involuntary tics — and their parents — should remember that these expressions and movements aren’t fake or attention-seeking. Instead, they’re an indication of significant distress that can be treated with help from a medical professional. At first, teens might not be aware of, or eager to discuss, how stress affects them.

Aldosari says patients should see a psychologist who can help them understand what contributed to their development of tics. He also notes that an evaluation of symptoms shouldn’t require expensive or intensive procedures like magnetic resonance imaging or a battery of blood tests, which is what some physicians ordered for their patients when the phenomenon first emerged during the pandemic.

Treatment involves addressing both the involuntary movements and vocalizations, as well as their underlying causes, like stress and anxiety. Cognitive behavioral-based therapies, which help patients identify how thoughts influence their feelings and behavior, can reverse or diminish tics. If a teen is diagnosed with a severe mental illness that’s gone undetected so far, treatment might also involve antidepressant or antipsychotic medications. Tics that developed in conjunction with social media use may improve when a patient reduces their exposure to it.

In the United Kingdom case study, the doctors noted that teen girls with tics posted content about their behaviors, which had notable benefits and drawbacks.

“They report that they gain peer support, recognition and a sense of belonging from this exposure,” wrote the doctors. “This attention and support may be inadvertently reinforcing and maintaining symptoms.”

Aldosari says that if teens and their parents want to prevent tics, they should be mindful of stress and unmediated social media use, particularly tic-related content. Teens experiencing headaches, sleep issues, social withdrawal, and conflicts with friends and family should consider those challenges as indicators that stress is taking a toll, whether they realize it or not.

The increase in tic disorders and other mental health conditions during the pandemic is just the “tip of the iceberg,” says Aldosari. For every teen who sought medical treatment at the ER, there are likely several others who contacted their physician or haven’t even received any care and therefore don’t show up in official statistics.

Aldosari says it’s critical to intervene quickly when symptoms begin: “Early recognition [and] early help could prevent a downward spiral.”

If you want to talk to someone or are experiencing suicidal thoughts, Crisis Text Line provides free, confidential support 24/7. Text CRISIS to 741741 to be connected to a crisis counselor. Contact the NAMI HelpLine at 1-800-950-NAMI, Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. – 10:00 p.m. ET, or email info@nami.org. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255. Here is a list of international resources.

Arcimoto’s Mean Lean Machine takes your energy and puts it back into your three-wheeled electric scooter.

The e-trike was announced at electric vehicle maker Arcimoto’s new product event Tuesday and shows how a three-wheeled device can be as thrilling as a regular e-scooter. But it features a lot more tilting and self-charging than your average ride.

The MLM features a pedal generator so you can sit on the e-trike while its stationary and charge up the battery for later riding. All juiced up, Arcimoto says it can last for more than 200 miles and that the ride feels as smooth and stable as a bicycle despite all the titling and leaning — even while braking. Each of the three corners of the trike has its own electric motor, and the weight distribution likely improves the trike’s stability.

Arcimoto is known for its other types of three-wheelers, including its “fun utility vehicle” that can hit 75 mph despite its small, golf-cart like size. Like the FUV, the MLM can fit up to two riders both leaning together.

While it’s available for preorder with a $100 fee, specifics like final price will be announced closer to its summer launch.

It’s been more than 15 years since The Office first aired on NBC, but fans are still learning mind-blowing new facts about the show every week.

On a recent episode of the Office Ladies podcast, former co-stars Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey chatted all about the two-part Season 6 episode, “Niagara.” They spoke with showrunner Greg Daniels about a scrapped storyline involving Pam’s ex Roy crashing the ceremony on horseback, they reminisced over Jim and Pam’s long-lost wedding website, and they shared what it was like to film the episode scene by scene.

After the Dunder Mifflin crew makes their way to Niagara Falls for the big celebration, they meet Jim and Pam’s parents at the rehearsal dinner.

Pam’s mom, Helene (who was played by Shannon Cochran in Season 2), is played by Linda Purl in “Niagara.” Pam’s dad, William, is played by Rick Overton. Jim’s mom, Betsy, is played by Perry Smith. And Jim’s dad? Gerald Halpert is played by one Robert Pine, the father of Chris Pine. Yes, Chris Pine of Star Trek, Spider Man: Into the Spiderverse, Just My Luck, Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, and The Four Chrises fame. That Chris Pine!

Did everyone know this? Because I certainly didn’t! I gasped when I found out, then told five of my colleagues (all of whom are big fans of The Office and several who are big fans of Chris Pine). They were all equally shocked.

Now, Robert Pine’s career spans decades, with too many iconic credits to list. Perhaps you know him from CHiPS or The Bold and the Beautiful, or maybe you recognize him from appearances in Grey’s Anatomy, Veep, Parks and Recreation, or Superstore. His IMDB page is overwhelmingly large, so you likely know him from something besides The Office. I certainly do, I just didn’t know he was Chris Pine’s dad!

Anyway, Kinsey said that “people were so excited” to work with Pine on the set of The Office. “We were a little bit excited,” Fischer confirmed, and the two proceeded to sing Pine’s praises.

“First of all, he’s a lovely, lovely person and was so nice to everyone,” Kinsey said. “But there were a few folks excited that Chris Pine’s dad was there.”

“It’s true,” Fischer said. “Even though Robert Pine is like an incredibly successful actor in his own right.” 

Unfortunately, the two didn’t share which cast members were Team Chris Pine, but if I had to guess, I’d say Mindy Kaling was probably living for this cameo.

Is Chris Pine a fan of The Office? Does he consider himself and Jim Halpert brothers in a sense? I have so many questions.

Be sure to listen to the full podcast episode to hear more behind-the-scenes stories about filming the episode, “Niagara: Part 1.”

You can stream episodes of The Office on Peacock and follow along with the podcast every week on Earwolf, Apple Podcasts, or Stitcher.