Science Glance
Down a short gravel track in a largely nondescript corner of Louisiana sits a gas processing facility, operated by a company whose chief executive is a major donor to Donald Trump. It may be the largest emitter of methane in the US.
The Energy Transfer site, located near the city of Shreveport, is named as the biggest single “super emitter” in new rankings of US oil and gas operations for the largest releases of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas that is rapidly overheating our planet, according to a new UCLA study, which is based on satellite data.
From January 2025 to June this year, the Shreveport facility spewed out methane at an average emission rate of 1.56 tonnes an hour, which is 15 times larger than the threshold defined in a Biden era program by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a super emitter event, according to the study. The Trump administration has put implementation of that program on hold but climate experts and advocates say reducing methane emissions is vital to limit the climate crisis.
The new rankings combine satellite data and public records to indicate a “potentially responsible operator” for each of the largest methane plumes, researchers at UCLA’s Emmett Institute say. Such a task can be complicated by a lack of official records naming sites with large methane emissions as well as ascertaining ownership of pollution coming from tight clusters of differing oil and gas leases.
A 10,000 year-old tooth in remarkable condition from an ancient Pacific mastodon, a large mammal that once inhabited North America, was recently discovered by a California scientist.
Netia McCray recalls how excited she was to join the federal advisory committee on long COVID in 2025. She had been diagnosed in the early days of the pandemic — and symptoms such as fatigue, heart palpitations and shortness of breath had become a frustrating but inescapable part of life.
The universe is a strange place — filled with exploding stars, ancient galaxies, and unseen worlds. Now, astronomers are about to get a brand new tool to explore it.
The last time I saw Laura Grego was in a tent in a baking field on the Welsh borders in May. The conversation on stage ranged from the dangers of space debris to how the law of the sea might pertain to outer space; from our sense of the sacred to our interplanetary futures. At one point Grego, a physicist, said intently, “People have to be aware of what is happening in space. Public knowledge has to catch up.” Three weeks later, SpaceX launched on the stock exchange, temporarily making Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire.
‘This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.
The US military said it killed four more people in a boat strike in the eastern Pacific ocean on Tuesday, marking the third deadly attack on vessels in the region in four days.
