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Science

A Beautiful “Dragon” Aurora Appeared Over Iceland

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Dragon Aurora - Live Science

A gargantuan green dragon hisses in the sky over Iceland. Either “Game of Thrones” really upped its production budget for its final season, or the sun belched a barrage of charged particles into our atmosphere again. As much as any of us would like to see a real dragon breathe flames into the winter sky, buzzkill NASA blames solar activity — as usual — for the writhing, “fire-breathing”- aurora that loomed over Iceland earlier this month. Auroras like this occur when some of the sun’s many magnetic field lines twist together and burst, creating sunspots. Charged particles gush out of … Read more

SPACE: Neptune’s New Moon Reveals Its Secrets

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Hippocamp moon - NASA

A faint and frigid little moon doesn’t have to go by “Neptune XIV” anymore. Astronomers have given a name — “Hippocamp” — to the most recently discovered moon of Neptune, which also formerly went by S/2004 N1. They’ve figured out how big the satellite is as well, and teased out some interesting details about its past, a new study reports. A team led by Mark Showalter, of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, announced the existence of S/2004 N1 in 2013. The scientists did so after analyzing photos taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope between … Read more

SCIENCE: Climate Change Could Destroy Stratocumulus Clouds, Which Would Scorch the Planet

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If humanity pumps enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, one of Earth’s most important types of cloud could go extinct. And if the stratocumulus clouds — those puffy, low rolls of vapor that blanket much of the planet at any given moment — disappear, Earth’s temperature could climb sharply and radically, to heights not predicted in current climate models. That’s the conclusion of a paper published today (Feb. 25) in the journal Nature Geoscience and described in detail by Natalie Wolchover for Quanta Magazine. As Wolchover explained, clouds have long been one of the great uncertainties of climate models. Clouds … Read more

SCIENCE: Does the Earth Eat Its Oceans Every Billion years?

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The ancient supercontinent of Rodinia turned inside out as the Earth swallowed its own ocean some 700 million years ago, new research suggests. Rodinia was a supercontinent that preceded the more famous Pangea, which existed between 320 million and 170 million years ago. In a new study, scientists led by Zheng-Xiang Li of Curtin University in Perth, Australia, argue that supercontinents and their superoceans form and break up in alternating cycles that sometimes preserve the ocean crust and sometimes recycle it back into Earth’s interior. “We suggest that the Earth’s mantle structure only gets completely reorganised every second supercontinent [or … Read more

SCIENCE: AI Sucks at Making Adorable Cat Photos

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Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were nearly impossible for human viewers to distinguish from photos of real people, programmers of the AI reported in a study that was posted December 2018 to the preprint journal arXiv. Felines, however, proved to be another story. The same algorithm that generated flawless human faces created cats with misshapen heads; … Read more

SCIENCE: When Earth Was a Snowball

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It’s difficult to imagine now, but at certain points in Earth’s history, ice covered the entire planet. This frozen Earth, nicknamed snowball Earth, was a setting “so severe, that the Earth’s entire surface, from pole to pole, including the oceans, completely froze over,” said Melissa Hage, an environmental scientist and assistant professor at Oxford College of Emory University in Georgia. In 1840, Louis Agassiz, a Swiss natural scientist, was among the first to acknowledge and provide evidence that Earth had gone through ice ages, according to the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Joseph Kirschvink, an American geologist, later coined … Read more

SCIENCE: How The World Ends Version Three

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A new study published in the journal Biological Conservation described as “a comprehensive review of 73 historical reports of insect declines from across the globe” makes a grim prediction: “dramatic rates of decline that may lead to the extinction of 40% of the world’s insect species over the next few decades.” Insects could completely disappear from the Earth within 100 years if they continue to decline at current rates, The Guardian notes: “More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, … Read more

SCIENCE: Is This The Birthplace of Earth’s Continents?

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Earth’s continents may have been born under large mountain ranges like the Andes. New research combining a mysterious missing trace element, a 66-million-year-old rock burped up by an ancient volcano, and a database of all the rock chemistry analyzed by scientists in the past century explains why Earth has continents. Published Jan. 16 in the journal Nature Communications, the study suggests that where mountains are born, so are continents. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” said study leader Ming Tang, a postdoctoral researcher in geology at Rice University in Houston. “There is a missing part in this continental jigsaw puzzle, and it … Read more

SCIENCE: Why Are the Northern and Southern Auroras Different?

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Auroras paint the sky around the poles when the sun is particularly active, flinging highly charged particles at Earth’s atmosphere. Scientists once thought that the gorgeous events were mirror images, but to their surprise, displays at the north (the aurora borealis) and south (the aurora australis) don’t precisely match. Ever since scientists realized these two celestial displays don’t line up, they’ve been trying to sort out why. Now, a team of researchers thinks it has found the reason — asymmetry in Earth’s magnetic tail. But what’s stranger is that the asymmetry is caused by the precise inverse of what scientists … Read more

Physicists Break the Rules of Light

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light - fantasy - pixabay

Physicists have built a ring in which pulses of light whip circles around each other and the normal rules that govern light’s behavior no longer apply. Under normal circumstances, light displays certain kids of physical symmetry. First, if you were to play a tape of light’s behavior forward and then backward, you would see it behave in the same way moving in both directions in time. This is called time-reversal symmetry. And second, light, which can move through the world as a wave, has what is called polarization: how it oscillates relative to the motion of the wave. That polarization usually … Read more