Space trash could be cleaned up using a giant inflatable bag

Space trash is making low Earth orbit increasingly dangerous for spacecraft

Millions of fragments from satellites, rockets, and other spacecraft that are no longer operational move thousands of meters per second as they circle Earth. Even a piece of debris a centimeter in size can cause mission-ending damage to space stations, telescopes, and astronauts.

Commercializing space debris removal may follow the commercialization of launches

Active debris removal is likely to focus on larger derelict objects, which are more easily identified and yield better financial returns. One actively researched possibility involves using netting to capture derelict objects before towing them into a controlled descent into an ocean.

Play a space junk collection game

Developed by Astroscale, a company with a contract from the UK to remove satellites from orbit safely, the game enables players to simulate the company's planned COSMIC mission and test their space debris-catching skills.

A solar-powered device with googly eyes is pulling trash from Baltimore's harbor

Mr. Trash Wheel uses a conveyor belt to scoop debris from the surface of Baltimore's Inner Harbor before it reaches the Chesapeake Bay, and it runs on a combination of water current and solar power.

Trace your trash bag's journey from the curb to the landfill

A single garbage truck can hold 10 to 12 tons of waste per load. After curbside pickup, trash is transported to a transfer station before its final trip to a landfill.

Could we throw trash inside volcanoes?

Americans toss out about 239 million tons of garbage each year. Some have wondered whether we could toss some (or all) of it into volcanoes, where it could be destroyed. There are about 1,500 active volcanoes on Earth, and many are pretty remote, making logistics complex. This video investigates whether the idea checks out.

Explaining the engineering challenges of extracting metal-rich nodules from the seafloor

Proposed solutions for collecting these potato-shaped rocks involve lifting a slurry composed of them, organic debris, and water through several kilometers of flexible tubing to a ship on the surface, a process that is more difficult than pumping crude oil. One method would use compressed air, but this method is only 15% energy-efficient.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

One man in Arizona works to defend Earth from catastrophic space rocks

David Rankin, an observer and operations engineer at the NASA-funded Catalina Sky Survey, spends his days scanning for solar system objects that could collide with our planet. The job requires employees to work long shifts to help prevent asteroids from destroying our planet.

Turning trash into music

In a town built on a landfill, a music teacher and young musicians created an orchestra using instruments made entirely from trash. From oil cans to bottle caps, they turned waste into music.

Astrobee is a free-floating robotic system helping with routine tasks on the ISS

Three cube-shaped robots use electric fans to fly through the microgravity environment of the International Space Station. They are equipped with cameras and sensors that allow them to "see" and navigate their surroundings to take inventory, document experiments, and move cargo.

Watch how deep-sea mining equipment collects and processes polymetallic nodules—metal-rich, potato-shaped rocks—from the ocean floor and creates environmentally damaging plumes of sediments.

Why space resource extraction companies are racing to harvest lunar helium

Without a magnetic field to deflect it away, helium-3 from solar wind has accumulated on the lunar surface over billions of years in significant quantities. With a reported value of $20M per kilogram because of its potential use in clean nuclear fusion, harvesting of helium-3 may form the basis of a future lunar economy.

Apollo astronauts left items in the moon's 'toss zone,' including golf balls, family photos, and bags of human waste, to make room for lunar rocks.

The world's largest garbage patch, explained

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world and is located between Hawaii and California. Scientists of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation have conducted the most extensive analysis ever of this area.

Watch the destructive force of bottom trawling on marine ecosystems

Bottom trawling is a fishing method where a net is dragged along the seafloor to catch a species of interest. The process produces as much carbon dioxide yearly as global aviation and leaves trails of destruction large enough to be seen in space.

Astronauts have repaired genetic damage in space using CRISPR—a molecular tool that can make precise changes to DNA and is used in single-celled organisms to attack invasive viruses.

Inhabiting Mars without terraforming might be accomplished with 'worldhouses'

A network of interconnected, airtight bubbles would require several orders of magnitude fewer materials than those required to re-establish the entire planet's atmosphere to resemble Earth. However, the whole network would be compromised by a single micrometeor impact that destroys the air seal.

Gaming out how our solar system might catch a new planet

If Pluto's downgraded status to a dwarf planet has got you down, consider this: Scientists think there's a chance our solar system could catch a new planet. The first ever observed so-called Interstellar Object was reported in 2017, a reddish, cigar-shaped rock astronomers named Oumuamua. Although it left in 2022, scientists believe an object with the right mass and trajectory might take a seat at the planetary table. Learn how it would work here.

Greenhouse gas removal consists of a series of techniques to capture and store GHGs

These include turning biomass into charcoal for storage in soil before it decays and releases carbon dioxide, crushing CO₂-absorbing rocks—increasing exposed surface area—and spreading them across land to accelerate GHG uptake, and restoring degraded peatlands, which can store twice the amount of carbon as the average forest.

Thousands of Atari cartridges were once buried in a New Mexico landfill

A waste management specialist unearthed a legendary cache of unsold games decades after they were buried, transforming one of gaming history's most famous disposal stories into an unexpected and lucrative salvage operation.

Ballistic experiments show that tardigrades are unlikely to be an alien species

Those fired from guns at speeds as high as 825 meters per second (1,845 mph) could be resuscitated after impact. Shock pressure from greater speeds tore apart the samples, suggesting they could not survive asteroid impacts if brought to Earth from outer space.

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

How chemical recycling could create 'infinite' plastic

The way we normally recycle plastics is a downward spiral of waste and degraded materials, but there is another option—turning plastic back into the oil it was made from.

The use of fungi to detoxify land and water—a process known as mycoremediation—has been used to clean up natural resources affected by the 2025 California wildfires.

More than 130 nations have enacted bans or restrictions on plastic items

Several US states have enacted similar restrictions on plastic bags, straws, food containers, and other single-use plastics, while others have prohibited plastic bans. Despite this, California’s plastic bag ban cut usage by more than 70%, showing the potential of these policies.

Supersonic parachutes have allowed rovers to safely land on Mars' surface

The disk-band-gap parachute design was first developed for the Viking Project in the 1970s. Since then, it has been reinforced and uses stronger materials to handle larger payloads—including the 2020 Perseverance rover—landing it a world record.

In 1971, a $35 ferret helped clean the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory

Lacking cleaning robots, Fermilab scientists purchased a ferret named Felicia when metal slivers obstructing accelerated particles were identified. They trained her to run strings through vacuum tubes more than 90 meters long, and cleanser-dipped swabs were then tied to the strings and pulled through to remove the debris.

Ceres—the largest object in the asteroid belt—may have once harbored a muddy ocean

NASA's Dawn mission revealed Ceres' surface composition, which contains salts, water ice, and organic material. Ceres' ocean likely froze over entirely in the past, when the presence of water may have allowed life to exist.

Explore the known asteroids, comets, and spacecraft involved in asteroid studies within our solar system with 'Eyes on Asteroids,' a 3D visualization from NASA.

Shooting stars, or meteors, are fragments of asteroids and comets that burn up as they enter Earth's atmosphere, creating streaks in the sky called meteor showers.

In 1984, Operation Smash Hit intentionally crashed a 239-ton train into a nuclear waste canister at 100 miles per hour to prove the canister's safety, which remained completely intact and lost just 0.29 of its 100 pounds of pressure.

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

Massive 3D printers have been used to build homes by stacking layers of 'concrete toothpaste,' a fire-resistant material that effectively insulates against outside noise.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

When caught in the mouths of cardinal fish, seed shrimp release glowing, bioluminescent chemicals, which alert predators of the cardinal fish, prompting the shrimp's ejection.

Double world record holder Hunter Ewen helped conquer his fear of balloons, called globophobia, by training to win Guinness World Record titles for balloon inflation.

Hotels in Cannes, the glamorous city on the French Riviera, hire hawks to ward off seagulls during the city's famous film festival.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

Stanford built a Google Maps for the Roman Empire, revealing how much it cost to travel in the ancient world

To reduce wrinkles in clothing, research recommends gentle wash cycles with more water and tumble drying with smaller loads and longer times.

Sony set the standard for cylinder-shaped batteries when it repurposed manufacturing equipment used to make rolls of magnetic recording tape.

Power lines are dotted with large, brightly colored balls to improve the visibility of these thin wires to helicopters and small planes and help prevent potential crashes.

The American cockroach is actually from Africa, an apparent hitchhiker aboard ships carrying enslaved people, with evidence suggesting the bug may have arrived in the New World as early as the 1600s.

Use this tool to calculate the dollar value of your parental mental load, from meal planning to coordinating after-school care, then see resources that help generate solutions.