The threat of an asteroid striking Earth is pretty scary — and not just in all the ways Hollywood movies have depicted — but human technology has reached a point where it might actually be possible for us to prevent an asteroid impact if we see one headed our way.
A multi-wavelength study of a pair of colliding galaxies has revealed the cause of a supermassive black hole’s case of ‘indigestion’. Results will be presented by Dr. Hayden Rampadarath at the National Astronomy Meeting at the University of Hull.
We might have to rethink the classic idea of a plesiosaur swimming with a bent neck. Pernille V. Troelsen, a Ph.D. student at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, simulated plesiosaur locomotion with 3D models and found that it would have been much easier for them to swim with a straight neck, and that’s likely how they moved around.
Penn State climate scientist, Michael ‘hockey stick’ Mann commits contempt of court in the ‘climate science trial of the century.’ Prominent alarmist shockingly defies judge and refuses to surrender data for open court examination. Only possible outcome: Mann’s humiliation, defeat and likely criminal investigation in the U.S.
Geological heat flow is fueling bottom melting and associated cracks across West Antarctica’s Larsen Ice Shelf, having little to do with man-made global warming. Significant amounts of high-quality data and relevant geological observations support this revelation, given historical and current geological mapping efforts done in Antarctica.
Around A.D. 79, Roman author Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis Historia that concrete structures in harbors, exposed to the constant assault of the saltwater waves, become “a single stone mass, impregnable to the waves and every day stronger.”
He wasn’t exaggerating. While modern marine concrete structures crumble within decades, 2,000-year-old Roman piers and breakwaters endure to this day and are stronger now than when they were first constructed.
I can understand when pop-scientists like Bill Nye spout scientific silliness. But complete nonsense coming from Stephen Hawking? Really?
In this video, Stephen Hawking claims that Trump withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Accord could lead to the Earth being pushed past a tipping point, with Venus-like 250 deg. C temperatures and sulfuric acid rain.
With preparations under way for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next report, a key challenge for scientists remains to explain properly the 20- year slowdown in surface temperature rises and the failure of models to predict it.
Climate experts promised us an ice-free Arctic in 2017, but with cold weather forecast over the Beaufort Sea in a week, and only 60 days left to the melt season, that might be rough.
The beleaguered honey bee is normally championed for its vital powers of pollination but a new study shows that we could soon be thanking them for inspiring more accurate color imaging in digital photography.
Researchers call it one of the “last frontiers of human colonization”: very high elevations where the oxygen is sparse and the temperatures are icy. Now research out of the Andean highlands of South America suggests the humans who braved such conditions more than 7,000 years ago did so in an impressive manner—year-round.
LAST JULY 4TH, NASA’s Juno spacecraft slowed its record-breaking pace just enough to get caught in the pull of Jupiter‘s gravity. (The timing, according to NASA, was just a very patriotic coincidence.) Either way, Independence Day 2016 was the last time the Juno mission pumped its brakes. In the year since the 66-foot solar-powered craft has given scientists more and weirder Jupiter data than they ever thought possible.
Today’s Madagascar is the land of lemurs, big-eyed creatures among the most huggable on the planet. But no one would want to hug the beast that once ruled this landscape.
New fossils reveal that 170 million years ago, a giant crocodile with serrated teeth like a Tyrannosaur Rex haunted Madagascar. Powerful jaws and sharp-edged teeth signal it was an uber-predator. Even the advanced meat-eating dinosaurs called theropods weren’t immune.
Oi, AI – what do you think you’re looking at? Understanding why machine learning algorithms can be tricked into seeing things that aren’t there is becoming more important with the advent of things like driverless cars. Now we can glimpse inside the mind of a machine thanks to a test that reveals which parts of an image an AI is looking at.