California has lost more than half of its coastal sand dunes, first-ever comprehensive assessment reveals
Peer-Reviewed Publication
Updates every hour. Last Updated: 13-Nov-2026 04:16 ET (13-Nov-2026 09:16 GMT/UTC)
A study conducted by UC Santa Barbara researchers and collaborators has found that California has lost more than half of its coastal dune systems. The researchers’ assessment — the first of its kind for the California coast — estimates that 60% of dune systems that existed from 1850, due to a combination of urban development, land-use changes and erosion.
Research led by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai along with Professor Subir Sarkar from the University of Oxford questions the widely accepted argument that the expansion rate of the universe is accelerating and that this is driven by ‘dark energy’ arising from the quantum vacuum. Their letter has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The findings divide opinion; in the same journal issue, a paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi also from the University of Oxford maintains that evidence does indeed point to the universe still accelerating.
Scientists at the Simon Foundation’s Flatiron Institute have modeled the strange dynamics of supersize fruit fly sperm, which swim about in a storage organ one-tenth the length of a single sperm. A new paper published June 22 in the journal Nature Physics shows how researchers combined mathematical models with more traditional biological approaches to find that, unlike human sperm, fruit fly sperm propel themselves off each other to create a slow collective churn.
SAN ANTONIO — June 22, 2026 —Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are using a solar wind forecasting method combined with analytic and numerical heliosphere models to find out where the first plasma boundary of the outer heliosphere lies as NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward this mysterious region of space.
Found in 2013, Pink Planet was too faint to study with ground-based telescopes. In new study, scientists used JWST and advanced processing methods to obtain its spectrum for the first time. Observations provided some of the first direct evidence for salt clouds in a cold object atmosphere. Pink Planet could be a giant planet or brown dwarf, so astronomers refer to it as a ‘planetary-mass companion’.