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A farmer in Canada has found an enormous piece of space junk in a field that is believed to have fallen from a SpaceX mission. The piece is 2 meters (6 feet) wide and weighs 40 kilograms (90 pounds). It landed on the farm of Barry Sawchuk in Saskatchewan province, northeast of the city of Regina.The fragment was found in late April. Sawchuck describes it as a burned-up piece of carbon fiber a honeycomb aluminum lattice in between. Attached to it there was what appears to be a hydraulic cylinder.        IFLScience is not responsible for content shared from external sites.“Not every day you go out in your field and find space junk,” Sawchuk told Global News. “We knew it came from the sky, because it couldn’t get there by itself.”"It's really just luck. If that had hit in the middle of Regina or, yeah, New York City, it very easily could have killed someone," University of Regina astronomy professor Samantha Lawler told CBC."Here in Ituna, Saskatchewan, we're in the process of building a [hockey] rink. I think, if I can, I'm going to sell it. Some of the proceeds will go to the rink," Sawchuk told CBC. "That's where I was born and raised, so why not?"Astronomer Jonathan McDowell, from the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics shared on Twitter that there was a recent mission that passed over Saskatchewan. The Dragon Trunk section of the Axiom 3 mission reentered over there on February 26. Asked if it is normal for such a big piece to survive the burn-up in the atmosphere, he had a pithy reply.“We are discovering that the composite materials the trunk is made from survive reentry surprisingly well,” McDowell said.       This is not the first time that bits of SpaceX's debris have fallen on Earth. Pieces from the SpaceX Crew-1 mission fell in Australia in 2022. Recently, a piece from an ISS junk drop fell onto a Florida house. The number of objects in orbit has skyrocketed recently due to megaconstellations such as SpaceX's Starlink, so space junk is more likely to be up there. And if it doesn’t truly burn up, chances are that it lands down here.

The number of people who use cannabis on a daily basis now exceeds the number of daily alcohol drinkers in the US, new research reveals. Overall, more people continue to consume booze than weed across the country, yet the proportion of high-frequency stoners has skyrocketed, overtaking regular alcohol use for the first time.Study author Jonathan P. Caulkins from Carnegie Mellon University looked at data from the National Household Survey on Drug Abuse as well as the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in order to determine how usage rates changed between 1979 and 2022. This period saw a number of major shifts in US drug policy, and results indicate that fluctuations in cannabis consumption closely mirror these legal and political developments.Caulkins focused on four milestone years that represented key junctures in the country’s official relationship with cannabis. The first of these was 1979, which is the earliest year for which data is available and marked the end of a period of liberalization during which 11 states decriminalized or reduced penalties for cannabis use.The next year under consideration was 1992, the end point of the highly punitive stance on cannabis adopted by both the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations. Next, Caulkins looked at data from 2008, which saw the beginning of a new era of federal non-interference with state policy and facilitated the legalization of cannabis in Washington and Colorado in 2012.Finally, the researcher looked at 2022, which is the most recent year for which data exists and is representative of the ongoing wave of state-level legalization and decriminalization across the US. Overall, Caulkins examined 27 surveys from these four years, including a total of 1.6 million respondents.Results indicate that reported cannabis use plunged to an all-time low in 1992 before rebounding as the political landscape became increasingly pot-friendly. In the early 90s, daily or near-daily drinkers outnumbered daily cannabis users by 8.9 million to 0.9 million. Three decades later, however, the number of regular pot users had increased 15-fold to 17.7 million, while daily drinkers numbered just 14.7 million. Looking closer at the data from 2022, the author found that the US still contains many more boozers than stoners, but while the average alcohol drinker partakes on just four or five days per month, those who use cannabis do so on 15 to 16 days each month.“These trends mirror changes in policy, with declines during periods of greater restriction and growth during periods of policy liberalization,” said Caulkins in a statement. “It is striking that high-frequency cannabis use is now more commonly reported than is high-frequency drinking,” he adds.As a caveat, it’s important to consider that the data comes from voluntary self-reports, and may therefore be heavily influenced by political dangers. For instance, many cannabis users are unlikely to have admitted to using the drug back in 1992, when penalties for doing so were extremely harsh.It’s therefore unclear if these numbers represent an actual increase in use or simply reflect a diminishing reluctance to openly report such behavior as the legal risks for doing so disappear. “Willingness to self-report may have increased as cannabis became normalized, so changes in actual use may be less pronounced than changes in reported use,” writes Caulkins.“Nonetheless, the enormous changes in rates of self-reported cannabis use, particularly of [daily or near-daily] use, suggest that changes in actual use have been considerable,” he concludes.The study is published in the journal Addiction.

Dozens of rivers and streams in the far reaches of Alaska have turned from crystal clear to a rusty color, some looking “like a milky orange juice.” According to a new study, the culprit is likely to be warming temperatures causing permafrost to thaw and leak metals into the waterways. Needless to say, the researchers believe the rusty waters could have “considerable implications” on the local wildlife, as well as drinking water quality in rural Alaska.Scientists at the US National Park Service, the US Geological Survey, and the University of California Davis recently ventured to northern Alaska’s Brooks Range and found at least 75 streams that had turned orange in the past 10 years. “The more we flew around, we started noticing more and more orange rivers and streams. There are certain sites that look almost like a milky orange juice,” Jon O’Donnell, lead study author and an ecologist for the National Park Service's Arctic Inventory and Monitoring Network, said in a statement. “The stained rivers are so big we can see them from space. These have to be stained a lot to pick them up from space,” continued Brett Poulin, principal investigator in the research and an assistant professor of environmental toxicology at UC Davis.Another aerial view of the orange waters at the Kutuk River in Alaska's Gates of the Arctic National Park.Image credit: Ken Hill / National Park ServiceSamples of the tainted streams showed the chemistry of the water had undergone a radical change in the past decade. The impaired waters contained high or elevated levels of iron, zinc, nickel, copper, and cadmium.Some of the water in the Agashashok River basin was also incredibly acidic, with a pH of just 2.6 – that’s not far from the acidity of lemon juice or white vinegar. Downstream from the highly acidic stream, the researchers noted the vegetation was “blackened and dead.”Iron is the prime reason these rivers appear a funky color. While iron itself is typically a metallic gray color, it often appears orange due to the formation of iron oxides. When iron is exposed to oxygen and moisture, it undergoes a chemical reaction that produces rust, scientifically known as iron(III) oxide, which has a reddish-orangey coloration. The preliminary data from the study suggests that metal mobilization in Alaska’s rivers could heighten the risk of population decline in key subsistence fish species, including Dolly Varden, chum salmon (Oncorhynchus keta), and whitefish (Coregonus).The problem is becoming more noticeable in northern Alaska, but the researchers warn that climate change is set to ensure it becomes increasingly common in other parts of the world where permafrost exists. “There’s a lot of implications,” O’Donnell said. “As the climate continues to warm, we would expect permafrost to continue to thaw and so wherever there are these types of minerals, there’s potential for streams to be turning orange and becoming degraded in terms of water quality.”The study was published in the Nature journal Communications: Earth & Environment.