Though once big enough to swallow three Earths with room to spare, Jupiter’s Great Red Spot has been shrinking for a century and a half. Nobody is sure how long the storm will continue to contract or whether it will disappear altogether. A new study suggests that it hasn’t all been downhill, though. The storm seems to have increased in area at least once along the way, and it’s growing taller as it gets smaller.
Car engines have come a long way in just a century. Back in 1932, the classic Ford V8 engine weighed a whopping 230 kilograms (about 507 pounds) but delivered just 48 kilowatts of power. Ford’s new EcoBoost engine, by comparison, delivers over triple the amount of power as its predecessor and is only half the weight.
No matter how many loads of laundry you have done, chances are you will shrink a favorite sweater or two. Shrinkage doesn’t always happen all at once, either. Applying any kind of heat to clothes causes their fibers to shorten, so several cycles in a hot washing machine or dryer can shrink the fabric over time. To avoid a collection of tiny shirts and shorts, stick to a cold-water cycle and hang delicate garments to dry.
In 2016, Australian researchers made an alarming discovery: Five islands in the Pacific Ocean had completely disappeared. This was no magic trick, though; the real culprit was climate change. Melting glaciers have caused sea levels to rise, covering the islands—which ranged in size from 2.5-12.4 acres—in the process. While the missing islands were not inhabited by humans, shrinking coastlines on six other islands have forced entire villages to relocate, the researchers found.
Up until about 100,000 years ago, sloths could be as tall as giraffes and beavers weighed as much as NFL linebackers. But that changed when Homo sapiens entered the picture, according to a 2018 study published in the journal Science. Due to rising global temperatures and overhunting of large mammals, the average animal size fell by an estimated 50 to 75 percent. Experts predict that animals will continue to shrink if humans don’t adjust their behavior.