Only Natural
During the last two decades, astronomers have found hundreds of planets orbiting stars outside our solar system. New research indicates they might have found even more except for one thing — some planets have fallen into their stars and simply no longer exist. [Um... duh.]
Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved... nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa... The so-called "Cape-colored" population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian... about 71 percent of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to western African origins. They also have between 13 percent and 15 percent European ancestry and a smaller amount of other African origins. There was "very little" evidence for American Indian genes among African-Americans....
an anomalous layer at the top of a subducting plate coincides with the locations of slow earthquakes and non-volcanic tremors... The presence of such a layer in similar settings elsewhere could point to other regions of slow quakes. Slow earthquakes, also called silent earthquakes, take days, weeks, or even months to release pent-up energy instead of seconds or minutes as in normal earthquakes....
[World tectonic plates illustrated]
What do you do when you have a fossil quarry that has yielded some of the most important and rarest of dinosaur fossils in North America, but the fossil-bearing layer of rock is tilted at 70 degrees and there is so much rock that not even jackhammers can get you to the fossils any longer? ... Over several days these skilled employees, using their expertise with explosives, blew away the rock covering the fossils and exposed a significant amount of the fossil-bearing layer so that excavation can begin again this year. Without their talents, scientifically important fossils would have remained locked underground in their stony mausoleum.....
probably the most ambitious seismological project ever conducted... USArray ... to run what amounts to an ultrasound scan over the 48 contiguous states of the US. Through the seismic shudders and murmurs that rack Earth's innards, it will build up an unprecedented 3D picture of what lies beneath North America. ... 400 transportable seismometers - will sweep all the way from the Pacific to the Atlantic. Having started off in California in 2004, it is now just east of the Rockies, stretching from Montana's border with Canada down past El Paso on the Texas-Mexico border. By 2013, it should have reached the north-east coast, and its mission end. ... "It is our version of the Hubble Space Telescope. With it, we'll be able to view Earth in a fundamentally different way..."
magniture 3.4 quake was centred 37 kilometres west-southwest of Bay Roberts, which is located on the island's Avalon Peninsula.
The Dynamic Designs Challenge will invite teams of students around the world to take part in a unique competition to design a building for an earthquake zone.
The asteroid impact and dinosaur extinction, say the authors, may not have been simultaneous, instead occurring 300,000 years apart. That's an eyeblink in geologic time, but it's a relevant eyeblink all the same — one that occurred at just the right moment in ancient history to send the extinction theory entirely awry. ... "Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact." ...
UK's Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, claimed House Democrats have refused to allow him to appear alongside former Vice President Al Gore at a high profile global warming hearing on Friday April 24, 2009 at 10am in Washington. Monckton told Climate Depot that the Democrats rescinded his scheduled joint appearance at the House Energy and Commerce hearing on Friday. Monckton said he was informed that he would not be allowed to testify alongside Gore when his plane landed from England Thursday afternoon. "The House Democrats don't want Gore humiliated, so they slammed the door of the Capitol in my face...."
Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it tastes vaguely of raspberries. ... While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries....
The Sun is the dimmest it has been for nearly a century. There are no sunspots, very few solar flares - and our nearest star is the quietest it has been for a very long time. The observations are baffling astronomers... Last year, it was expected that it would have been hotting up after a quiet spell. But instead it hit a 50-year low in solar wind pressure, a 55-year low in radio emissions, and a 100-year low in sunspot activity....
stunning images of Saturn taken by Nasa's Cassini spacecraft show the ringed planet, its moons and rings in the most incredible detail yet.
incredible pictures from Nasa's new telescope show a galaxy of millions.... Scientists believe it could unveil the first gripping evidence of small, rocky planets like the Earth with the right conditions to support life....
planet known as Gliese 581d has a lot more in common with Earth than astronomers first thought. ... New measurements of the planet's orbit place it firmly in a region where conditions would be right for liquid water, and thus life as we know it.... orbits its host in 66.8 days, putting it just inside the cool star's habitable zone....
Famed mathematician Stephen Hawking was rushed to a hospital Monday and was seriously ill.... has been fighting a chest infection for several weeks...
New Madrid appears to be cold and dying. ... thermally New Madrid is surprisingly similar to other areas of the eastern United States.... future earthquakes will occur somewhere else when the New Madrid system "shuts down." Once this happens, it may be a very long time — thousands of years or longer — before New Madrid becomes active again. "Although we don't know when the New Madrid fault system will shut down, it may be dying today,"
new instrument that is able to track the transition between the relatively gentle winds of Earth's atmosphere and the more violent flows of charged particles in space... help pinpoint the so-called edge of space... space begins 118 km above Earth...
new microscopy technique to watch the growth of individual neurons in the microscopic roundworm.... They asked, "How long should a worm's neurons be?" And the worms fired back, "Long enough to reach their targets..." Rather than growing like the branches of a tree — extending outward — certain neurons work backward from their destination, dropping anchor and stretching their dendrites behind them as they crawl away.
Marc Morano does not think global warming is anything to worry about, and he brags about his confrontations with those who do. ... once spotted former Vice President Al Gore on an airplane returning from a climate conference in Bali. Mr. Gore was posing for photos with well-wishers, and Mr. Morano said he had asked if he, too, could have his picture taken with Mr. Gore. He refused, Mr. Morano said. "You attack me all the time," Mr. Gore said... As a spokesman for Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the Environment and Public Works Committee, Mr. Morano was for years a ceaseless purveyor of the dissenting view on climate change, sending out a blizzard of e-mail to journalists covering the issue....
Spring wildfires in the middle of the country have now become deadly. The flames claimed two lives ... a couple was killed when flames tore through their rural home....
The president's new science adviser said Wednesday that global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth's air. John Holdren told The Associated Press in his first interview since being confirmed last month that the idea of geoengineering the climate is being discussed. [Save the climate: have Obama administration officials quit blowing hot air]
There's nothing like a good scratch, but how does it take away the itchiness?... In people, a variety of stimuli, including chemicals like histamine, prompt sensory neurons to fire, sending a signal via the spinothalamic tract (STT) to the brain, prompting an itchy feeling.... scratching the skin caused the frequency of the firing to drop in some of the neurons, indicating that these are the ones targeted by scratching....
The progress of the earth sciences and the advancement of technologies associated with the understanding of our planet during the 1940's and 50's have led geologists to develop a new way of looking at the world and how it works. This exhibit explains the history of our new understanding of the Earth and provides a brief overview of the theories behind it.
To see continental positions during a particular time, click on the STOP button of your browser as the red arrow reaches the era of interest.
[Graphic demonstrating energy release and incidents of different magnitude quakes]
Alaska Earthquake 1964. 210 photos. 3 resolutions are available.
The 1964 Alaska earthquake, also known as the Great Alaskan Earthquake, the Portage Earthquake and the Good Friday Earthquake, was a megathrust earthquake that began at 5:36 P.M. AST on Good Friday, March 27, 1964. Across south-central Alaska, ground fissures, collapsing buildings, and tsunamis resulting from the earthquake caused about 131 deaths. Lasting nearly four minutes, it was the most powerful recorded earthquake in U.S. and North American history, and the second most powerful ever measured by seismograph. It had a magnitude of 9.2, at the time making it the second largest earthquake in recorded history.
Certain exotic atomic nuclei contain particles that shear off from the central core and create a cloud, which surrounds the central core like a 'heiligenschein' or halo.
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