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Science

SPACE: There’s Ice on the Moon!

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Lunar Ice - NASA

Scientists have detected the first-ever evidence of frozen water on the moon, on the darkest and coldest parts of the lunar surface. While prior analysis of the moon hinted at some ice reserves, this is the first time that ice has been observed at the north and south poles ­— and the signs of water ice are “direct and definitive,” according to a new study. Researchers peered at suspected icy patches using an instrument called the Moon Mineralogy Mapper (M3), which used the near-infrared spectrum to pinpoint the signature activity of ice molecules interacting with infrared light. This helped the … Read more

SCIENCE: Meet Steve, the Happy Sky Glow

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Steve - Live Science

Late at night on July 25, 2016, a thin river of purple light slashed through the skies of northern Canada in an arc that seemed to stretch hundreds of miles into space. It was a magnificent, mysterious, borderline-miraculous sight, and the group of citizen skywatchers who witnessed it decided to give the phenomenon a fittingly majestic name: “Steve.” Given its coincidence with the northern lights, Steve was just thought to be part of the aurora — the shimmering sheets of nighttime color that appear in the sky when charged plasma particles streak out of the sun, sail across space on … Read more

SCIENCE: Catching a Zombie (Virus)

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zombie - pixabay

There’s no way around it: Viruses are scary. They’re invisible to the naked eye, they can be difficult to get rid of and many are capable of spreading quickly. That’s why it’s important to detect a disease-causing virus before it has the chance to infect so many people that it’s impossible to contain. Failure to detect and contain a deadly virus early enough to prevent an outbreak is a key component of the story in AMC’s sci-fi series “Fear the Walking Dead” (which airs on Sundays at 9 p.m. EDT/8 p.m. CDT, starting Aug. 12). The show, now in its … Read more

STUDY: Sound Has a Negative Mass

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sound waves - pixabay

Sound has negative mass, and all around you it’s drifting up, up and away — albeit very slowly. That’s the conclusion of a paper submitted on July 23 to the preprint journal arXiv, and it shatters the conventional understanding that researchers have long had of sound waves: as massless ripples that zip through matter, giving molecules a shove but ultimately balancing any forward or upward motion with an equal and opposite downward motion. That’s a straightforward model that will explain the behavior of sound in most circumstances, but it’s not quite true, the new paper argues. [The Mysterious Physics of … Read more

REPORT: Earth Dangerously Close to the Tipping Point for a ‘Hothouse Earth’

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drought - pixabay

It’s the year 2300. Extreme weather events such as building-flattening hurricanes, years-long droughts and wildfires are so common that they no longer make headlines. The last groups of humans left near the sizzling equator pack their bags and move toward the now densely populated poles. This so-called “hothouse Earth,” where global temperatures will be 7 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius) higher than preindustrial temperatures and sea levels will be 33 to 200 feet (10 to 60 meters) higher than today, is hard to imagine — but easy to fall into, said a new perspective article published … Read more

SCIENCE: Hobbits Not Related to Pygmies, Study Says

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Hobbit Home - pixabay

Ever since finding the remains of the “hobbits” — a small-statured species of ancient human — on the island of Flores in Indonesia, scientists have wondered whether the modern Pygmy people who now call the island home were in any way related to them. Now, researchers have found that the answer is “no,” the modern-day Pygmies on Flores are not related to the ancient hobbits, who go by the scientific name Homo floresiensis. While the genomes of modern Pygmy people on Flores have DNA sequences from other ancient human relatives — the Denisovans and the Neanderthals — they have “no … Read more

SCIENCE: What If Earth Turned into a Giant Pile of Blueberries?

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Blueberries - pixabay

If our planet suddenly turned into an Earth-size pile of blueberries, things would start exploding. This is science. Specifically, it’s the conclusion of a juicy paper submitted to the preprint server arXiv on July 27. (Papers on arXiv have not yet passed through the peer-review process or been published in journals.) The author, Anders Sandberg, a computational neuroscientist with a broad research portfolio at the University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, addresses the problem — originally posed on the website Stack Exchange — in thorough, blueberry-bursting fashion. Sandberg’s paper aims to answer the question, “What if the entire Earth … Read more

SCIENCE: Killing the Arrow of Time

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Time - Pixabay

A new technique for quantum computing could bust open our whole model of how time moves in the universe. Here’s what’s long seemed to be true: Time works in one direction. The other direction? Not so much. That’s true in life. (Tuesday rolls into Wednesday, 2018 into 2019, youth into old age.) And it’s true in a classical computer. What does that mean? It’s much easier for a bit of software running on your laptop to predict how a complex system will move and develop in the future than it is to recreate its past. A property of the universe … Read more

U=(N/T)M*G: Dyson

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The Sun lights up the sphere from the outside, and it hangs like a great golden topaz in the Universe, a jewel in the vast blackness. Surrounded by other jewels of sodalite and jasper and pale, pale rubies. The star is visible, a hazy globe of fire, its largest attendant planets vague dots through the translucent wall. That’s the first image which came to mind when I read this newest piece to come out of the science community. New Horizons, the probe we sent out to Pluto back when it was still a planet (Viva la Pluto!), has confirmed there’s … Read more

SCIENCE: When Skin Turns to Stone

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Stiff Skin Syndrome - deposit photos

A Colorado boy has an extremely rare condition that’s causing his skin to harden “like stone,” his parents say. The 12-year-old boy, Jaiden Rogers, has stiff skin syndrome, and his parents are hoping to stop the spread of the disease before he “becomes entombed within himself,” People magazine reported Wednesday (July 18). Jaiden was diagnosed with the condition in January 2013, when his father noticed a hard lump on the boy’s right thigh, Fox News reported today (July 20). Since then, the painful disease has spread to his hips, stomach and back. But as it spreads to his chest area, … Read more