your science briefing for 03.12.2025

The moon hoarders of the outer solar system, plastic is ruining everything, how space junk is being boosted by global warming, and more...

And the new heavyweight moon champion of the solar system is in, and despite its very solid showing with 95 moons, Jupiter lost, and not by a little. No, Saturn carried the title with an astonishing 274 moons. You didn’t misread that, nor did I add a few hundred extra objects. A new survey discovered 128 new moons to add to the tally, although there are a few points of note. They’re are not small, captured worlds as we usually tend to think of them, but eccentric shards of bigger moons that collided 100 million years ago, or thereabouts… (EarthSky)

As global warming is already poised to make life a whole lot worse for as much as half of all humans and create wave after wave of refugee crises, scientists made another horrible discovery. Microplastics, which by now are everywhere, including your brain and organs, are now starting to affect crop yields. What does that mean? Nothing we could call good. In the next 20 to 30 years, as many as 400 million may be at risk of a famine as microscopic plastic shards undermine plant growth… (The Guardian)

In more weird but terrible news for the planet, new models found that greenhouse gas emissions shrink the thermosphere, the part of the upper atmosphere were things like the ISS and satellites tend to orbit. This means less drag on not only the ever growing constellations of satellites, but also dangerous space junk, which means they will stay in orbit longer, increasing risks of collisions, and making it more difficult to de-orbit in the coming decades… (ScienceAlert)

Remember acid rain? Thankfully, we got rid of that scary menace. Now, instead, we’re getting plastic rain. That’s right. Even something as basic as rainwater is now full of so much microscopic plastic, PFAS chemicals, and pesticides that at this point, there is nowhere on the planet where is it safe to drink any water without filtering it for all the synthetic nastiness contaminating it… (Vox)

Just in case there’s not enough bad news for you in this briefing so far, here’s another tidbit of terrible info. Thanks to completely unnecessary and counter-productive cuts to global aid agencies, tuberculosis is starting to make a comeback in the developing world as access to testing and treatments is being rapidly curtailed… (NYT)