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Science

The Corona Virus Is Making the Earth Vibrate Less

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Earth - pixabay

Once-crowded city streets are now empty. Highway traffic has slowed to a minimum. And fewer and fewer people can be found milling about outside. Global containment measures to combat the spread of the coronavirus have seemingly made the world much quieter. Scientists are noticing it, too. Around the world, seismologists are observing a lot less ambient seismic noise — meaning, the vibrations generated by cars, trains, buses and people going about their daily lives. And in the absence of that noise, Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less. Thomas Lecocq, a geologist and seismologist at the Royal Observatory … Read more

Scientists Find a (Piece of) Lost Continent

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Baffin Island - Deposit Photos

A piece of a lost continent has been discovered lurking beneath Canada — and the evidence was hiding in rocks that originated in Earth’s interior, where diamonds form. The secret was concealed in a type of diamond-bearing volcanic rock, known as kimberlite. Kimberlite originates deep underground in magma in Earth’s mantle, and picks up hitchhiking diamonds as it hurtles toward the surface during volcanic eruptions. The kimberlite, from Baffin Island in northern Canada, was collected by a diamond mining and manufacturing company. Scientists found that the mineral chemistry of the Baffin Island kimberlite matched that from an ancient and long-lost … Read more

Is There Dark Matter Inside the Earth?

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super collider

Dark matter is a hypothetical component to our universe, used to explain many strange behaviors of stars and galaxies. Despite the almost overwhelming evidence that dark matter does indeed exist, we still don’t know what it’s made of. Detectors scattered around the world have been operating for decades, trying to catch the faint trace of a passing dark matter particle, but to no avail. A new paper offers an alternative approach: dig deep. We know that dark matter exists through a variety of astronomical observations. Stars are orbiting the centers of their galaxies too fast. Galaxies are whizzing around inside … Read more

FACT CHECK: Corona Virus Did Not Come From Outer Space

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Asteroid - pixabay

No, the new coronavirus didn’t come from outer space. We promise. With the coronavirus pandemic continuing to spread around the globe, people are panicked, and they’re looking for answers and explanations. One wild theory that has made its way around the web is that the virus came from space. Spoiler alert: The virus did not come from space. Recently, Chandra Wickramasinghe, known for his work in astronomy and astrobiology, spread the idea that the virus was living on a comet and a piece of that space rock may have fallen to Earth during a brief fireball event over China in … Read more

When the Days Really Were Shorter

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bivalve fossil

When dinosaurs still left fresh footprints on the mud, our planet twirled around faster than it does today. Chronicled in the rings of an ancient timekeeper is a story of days half an hour shorter and years a week longer than they are today, according to a new study. That ancient timekeeper is an extinct rudist clam, one of a group of mollusks that once dominated the role that corals fill today in building reefs. The clam belonged to the species Torreites sanchezi and lived 70 million years ago in a shallow tropical seabed, which is now dry land in … Read more

Did German Physicists Accidentally Discover Dark Matter 6 Years Ago?

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dark matter - pixabay

Could we have already discovered dark matter? That’s the question put forth in a new paper published Feb.12 in the Journal of Physics G. The authors outlined how dark matter might be made of a particle known as the d*(2380) hexaquark, which was likely detected in 2014. Dark matter, which exerts gravitational pull but emits no light, isn’t something anyone’s ever touched or seen. We don’t know what it’s made of, and countless searches for the stuff have come up empty. But an overwhelming majority of physicists are convinced it exists. The evidence is plastered all over the universe: Clusters … Read more

SCIENCE: New Insect Species Named After Gaga

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Kaikaia gaga

Lady Gaga has a new little monster after a small insect from Nicaragua was named in her honor. Kaikaia gaga is a type of treehopper. The bugs are known for their bright coloring and individuality in appearance. They “sing” to each other by vibrating plant stems. “If there is going to be a Lady Gaga bug, it’s going to be a treehopper, because they’ve got these crazy horns, they have this wacky fashion sense about them,” Brendan Morris, a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said. “They’re unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.” Morris discovered the differences … Read more

SCIENCE: Green Algae is the Ancestor of All Plants

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green algae - pixabay

The oldest green seaweed on record, the ancestor of all land plants, lived about 1 billion years ago, a new study finds. Scientists have discovered the fossils of what may be the oldest green algae ever known. The newfound seaweed — called Proterocladus antiquus — lived about a billion years ago. And even though it was tiny, about 0.07 inches (2 millimeters) in length, the algae had a big role: It could produce oxygen through photosynthesis. “Its discovery indicates that green plants we see today can be traced back to at least 1 billion years ago, and they started in … Read more

SCIENCE: The Global Ocean

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open ocean - pixabay

What did Earth look like 3.2 billion years ago? New evidence suggests the planet was covered by a vast ocean and had no continents at all. Continents appeared later, as plate tectonics thrust enormous, rocky land masses upward to breach the sea surfaces, scientists recently reported. They found clues about this ancient waterworld preserved in a chunk of ancient seafloor, now located in the outback of northwestern Australia. Around 4.5 billion years ago, high-speed collisions between dust and space rocks formed the beginnings of our planet: a bubbling, molten sphere of magma that was thousands of miles deep. Earth cooled … Read more

SCIENCE All About Schrödinger’s cat

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Schrödinger's Cat - Pixabay

The thought experiment known as Schrödinger’s cat is one of the most famous, and misunderstood, concepts in quantum mechanics. By thinking deeply about it, researchers have come to spectacular insights about physical reality. Who came up with Schrödinger’s cat? The Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who helped found the discipline of quantum mechanics, first conceived of his feline conundrum in 1935 as a commentary on problems originally posed by the luminary Albert Einstein, according to an article in Quanta Magazine. While developing their new understanding of the subatomic realm, most of Einstein and Schrödinger’s colleagues had realized that quantum entities exhibited … Read more