Rocky extrasolar planets thought to be half frozen and half scorched might instead rock back and forth, creating large swaths of twilight with temperatures suitable for life.
Because of gravitational tugs with the objects they orbit, rocky bodies often settle into trajectories in which they always show the same face to their hosts. Such ‘tidally locked’ exoplanets would thus seem like bad candidates for life, since the hemisphere facing their host stars would roast and the dark side would freeze.
But a new computer model by Anthony Dobrovolskis of NASA Ames Research Center in California, US, suggests this is not always so. He finds that such planets can rock to and fro if they travel on elongated, or eccentric orbits, creating a ‘twilight zone’ that could be hospitable to life.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: newscientist.com
For years, no military program has sparked more fevered speculation from conspiracy theorists than the mysterious High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. And for years, the Pentagon has been pooh-poohing speculation that the enormous collection of transmitters, radars, and magnetometers in Alaska was some sort of superweapon.But, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may not have been entirely off-base, after all.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: wired.com
Volcanoes were active on the Moon’s surface soon after it was formed, a new study in the journal Nature suggests.
Precision dating of a lunar rock that fell to Earth shows our satellite must have had lava erupting across its vast plains 4.35 billion years ago.
This is hundreds of millions of years earlier than had been indicated by the rocks collected by Apollo astronauts.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: bbc.co.uk
Remains of a bus-sized prehistoric “monster” reptile found on a remote Arctic island may be a new species never before recorded by science, researchers said Tuesday.
Initial excavation of a site on the Svalbard islands in August yielded the remains, teeth, skull fragments and vertebrae of a reptile estimated to measure nearly 40 feet long, said Joern Harald Hurum of the University of Oslo.
“It seems the monster is a new species,” he told The Associated Press.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: wired.com
Swarms of miniature airplanes that could someday track hurricanes, helping researchers make better predictions about the storms’ course and strength, are being tested in the US.
Researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder have developed small uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) that link up to form an airborne network, allowing the planes to coordinate their behaviour independently of a central control. And they are working on networking autonomous subs the same way.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: newscientist.com
Imagery could help scientists figure out history of ‘Home Plate’. NASA’s sharpest-eyed orbiter at Mars has spotted the Spirit rover far below, sitting on an enigmatic rock formation nicknamed “Home Plate.”
Such imagery could provide new clues about the plateau’s geological history — and serve as a guide for Spirit’s future sojourns around Home Plate, Ken Herkenhoff of the U.S. Geological Survey told msnbc.com on Monday.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: msnbc.msn.com
The 7 Incredible Natural Phenomena: Venezuela’s Everlasting Storm, Honduras’ Rain of Fishes,Morocco’s Climbing Goats,Kerala’s (extraterrestrial?) Red Rain,Brazilian’s longest wave on the Earth,Denmark’s Black Sun,Idaho’s Fire Rainbow
Click Here To Read More!
Source: oddee.com
Forget about the threat that mankind poses to the Earth: our very ability to study the heavens may have shortened the inferred lifetime of the cosmos.
That does not mean the field of astronomy does direct harm. A universe with a truncated lifespan may come hand in hand with the ability of astronomers to make cosmological measurements, according to two American scientists who have studied the strange, subtle and cosmic implications of quantum mechanics, the most successful theory we have.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: telegraph.co.uk
More than four times the number of natural disasters are occurring now than did two decades ago, British charity Oxfam said in a study Sunday that largely blamed global warming.
“Oxfam… says that rising green house gas emissions are the major cause of weather-related disasters and must be tackled,” the organisation said, adding that the world’s poorest people were being hit the hardest.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: physorg.com
At the age of six months, most babies have barely learnt to sit up, let alone crawl, walk or talk.
But, according to new research, they can already assess someone’s intentions towards them, deciding who is a likely friend or enemy.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: bbc.co.uk
They are making orange peel plastic and robots that can heal themselves. They are six researchers with six ideas that will one day change the world. Everything from making orange peel plastic to robots that can heal themselves.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: esquire.com
Pollution in the seas is now speeding global warming, says a devastating new climate report. Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world’s governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.
The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: independent.co.uk
An impoverished surfer has drawn up a new theory of the universe, seen by some as the Holy Grail of physics, which as received rave reviews from scientists.
His proposal is remarkable because, by the arcane standards of particle physics, it does not require highly complex mathematics.
Even better, it does not require more than one dimension of time and three of space, when some rival theories need ten or even more spatial dimensions and other bizarre concepts.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: telegraph.co.uk
A Japanese moon probe has replicated the famous Apollo-era “Earth-rise” photograph with modern high-definition imaging.
The Kaguya spacecraft, also called Selene, has been orbiting 62 miles (100 kilometers) above the moon since Oct. 18.
The new Earth-rise image shows our blue world floating in the blackness of space.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: foxnews.com
We could have alien origins, say scientists who sent fossilized microscopic life-forms into space and back inside an artificial meteorite.
The researchers attached the baseball-size rock to the outside of the European Space Agency’s Foton M3 spacecraft to test whether biological material could survive the round-trip journey.
Sculpted from stone from the Orkney Islands in northern Scotland, the rock contained fossilized microbes and the molecular signatures of microbes.
Click Here To Read More!
Source: nationalgeographic.com
