An aurora borealis-like phenomenon observable in Canada — but much farther south than the northern lights appear — over Childs Lake, Manitoba. It has been given the name Steve, for Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement.
A research paper has shed light on what Steve actually is, and scientists have proposed a moniker: Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement. So, it’s still Steve. But as a “bacronym” — a retroactive acronym. Steve has a lot in common with a phenomenon called a “sub-auroral ion drift,” or S.A.I.D., in which ions flow very quickly from east to west, closer to the Equator than the aurora borealis. Dr. MacDonald and Dr. Donovan worked with data from Swarm, a constellation of satellites run by the European Space Agency, and learned that Steve is a strip of ionized gas, as hot as the earth’s core and moving through the air at about four miles per second. Further research revealed that Steve was similar to a sub-auroral ion drift. “S.A.I.D.s don’t really have any visual features, so the relationship between them and something as visually stunning as Steve is super fascinating,” he said, adding that his group will keep working with Dr. MacDonald, Dr. Donovan and others to understand the relationship between the two phenomena. "That collaboration between formally trained scientists and dedicated enthusiasts is what makes this project unique," Dr. MacDonald said. “I think of it as a disruptive innovation,” she added. “Something unexpected that changes the way you look at things.”
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It’s not every morning that you get the opportunity to witness a triple lunar coincidence in the pre-dawn skies before you’ve even brewed your coffee. But on Wednesday morning in the United States, early morning skygazers were treated to what the internet has dubbed a "super blue blood moon." A BLUE moon happens when there are two full moons within a single calendar month. A supermoon occurs when the moon orbits closer to planet Earth than usual. There was a supermoon on Jan. 1 to start off the year. That’s how we get a “SUPER blue moon.” During a lunar eclipse, Earth passes between the moon and the sun, and the planet casts its shadow over its lunar satellite. It’s nothing like the spectacle of a total solar eclipse, but the red tinge the moon takes on is striking. And it gives us the “super blue BLOOD moon.”
scientists report that a 16-year-old orca named Wikie was able to copy a variety of new sounds on command. The study joins a growing body of research illustrating the deep importance of social learning for killer whales. In the wild, killer whales live in tight-knit, matriarchal pods with unique vocal traditions. For decades, scientists have suspected that orcas acquire these dialects through social learning rather than genetic inheritance. Observations of captive killer whales making new calls when moved to a different social setting, or even mimicking the whistles and clicks of dolphins and the barks of sea lions, suggested that might be the case. This study takes it a step further, providing “gold-standard, controlled experimental evidence” that orcas can learn fresh sounds through imitation.
The research was conducted at the Marineland Aquarium in Antibes, France. For their study, Dr. Abramson and colleagues trained Wikie’s calf, Moana, to make five sounds outside of Wikie’s natural repertoire, including that of a creaking door, an elephant and a raspberry. Then they instructed Wikie to copy each vocalization, either by listening to Moana directly or through speakers. Both human and machine methods deemed Wikie successful at learning the novel sounds presented to her, including those uttered by humans. “This is the first study to show that killer whales can make recognizable copies of human sounds,” Dr. Abramson said, which is unexpected because orcas have very different anatomical structures for vocalization than us. To scientists who study lakes and rivers, it seems humans have embarked on a huge unplanned experiment. By burning fossil fuels, we have already raised the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 40 percent, and we’re on track to increase it by much more. Some of that gas may mix into the world’s inland waters, and recent studies hint that this may have profound effects on the species that live in them. Scientists began taking continuous measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the 1950s, and today they have more than six decades of consistent readings. In the 1980s, oceanographers followed suit, developing carbon dioxide sensors and deploying them across the planet. Over the past three decades, they’ve chronicled a steady rise of carbon dioxide in seawater. The increasing concentration can harm marine life in many ways.
It lowers the pH of seawater, for one thing, making it more acidic and interfering with the chemistry that coral, for instance, use to build their calcium skeletons. Ocean acidification also thins the shells of oysters and other animals.Many marine organisms rely on chemical changes in water to find food and avoid danger. “Many fish are not able to detect their predators anymore,” said Linda C. Weiss, an aquatic ecologist at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany. “They can even get more bold.” Now that researchers have grown concerned about carbon dioxide levels, they’ve been developing ways to reconstruct their history.
Humans, chimpanzees, elephants, and bottle-nosed dolphins can recognize themselves in a mirror, according to scientific reports, although as any human past age 50 knows, that first glance in the morning may yield ambiguous results. Mirror self-recognition, at least after noon, is often taken as a measure of a kind of intelligence and self-awareness, although not all scientists agree. Researchers have wondered not only about which species display this ability, but about when it emerges during early development. Children start showing signs of self-recognition at about 12 months at the earliest and chimpanzees at two years old, but dolphins start mugging for the mirror as early as seven months, earlier than humans.
Diana Reiss a psychologist at Hunter College, and Rachel Morrison, then a graduate student working with Reiss, studied two young dolphins over three years at the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Dr. Reiss said the timing of the emergence of self-recognition is significant, because in human children the ability has been tied to other milestones of physical and social development. Since dolphins develop earlier than humans in those areas, the researchers predicted that dolphins should show self-awareness earlier. Seven months was when Bayley, a female, started showing self-directed behavior, like twirling and taking unusual poses. Foster, the male, was almost 14 months when the study started. He had a particular fondness for turning upside down and blowing bubbles in front of the one-way mirror in the aquarium wall through which the researchers observed and recorded what the dolphins were doing. The animals also passed a test in which the researchers drew a mark on some part of the dolphin’s body it could not see without a mirror. In this so-called mark test, the animal must notice and pay attention to the mark. Animals with hands point at the mark and may touch it. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/science/trump-zinke-pacific-marine-reserves.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Fscience&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=rank&module=package&version=highlights&contentPlacement=1&pgtype=sectionfront
The scarlet gilia can be found standing tall among the sagebrush on mountainsides, its red flowers blazing. The drought, shade, and the mule and elk grazing does not faze it. Biologists call plants like this the overcompenstors. Overcompensation was first observed in the scarlet gilia in 1987. Joanna Klein writes "In the study published this month in the journal Ecology, scientists showed for the first time that in an experiment, damaging some plants set off a molecular chain of events that caused them to grow back bigger, and produce more seeds and chemical defenses simultaneously."
Dr. Paige looked for a molecular mechanism behind oercompenstion in various types of Arabidopsis. He started seeing indications that not only did they get bushier and produce more seeds, but they also ramped up their chemical defenses. Most plants respond to damage with a process called endoreduplication, in which a cell can copy its DNA over and over without splitting into two cells. This gives the plant bigger cells with multiple energy factories to accomplish a variety of tasks. Many damaged plants only show minimal levels of endoreduplication. But the overcompensators go into overdrive with the process. In the case of the study’s mustard plants, they were able to grow bigger and also produce glucosinolate, the sulfurish, bitter chemical compound in mustard, kale, cabbage and horseradish. In ABBOT POINT, Australia, a grassy stretch of prime grazing land sits above a vein of coal so rich and deep that it could be mined for decades. Australian government is proposing building the world's largest coal mine. Jacqueline Williams writes "But the plan has met intense opposition in Australia and abroad, focusing attention on a question with global resonance: Given the threat of climate change and the slowing global demand for coal, does the world really need another giant mine, especially at the public’s expense?"
The project, known as the Carmichael mine, has provoked strong resistance in part because of its proximity to the Great Barrier Reef, a natural wonder that is already dying because of overheated seawater blamed on climate change. The plan to ship coal to India would further damage the ecosystem of the world’s greatest system of reefs. Williams writes "A host of Australian celebrities — including the rock band Midnight Oil — and international groups have urged Mr. Turnbull to kill the project, arguing that such a large mine would violate Australia’s commitment in the Paris climate accord to work to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels." Beneath Yellowstone National Park lies a supervolcano. It sparked when new magma moved into the system. Yellowstone's last supereruption was 631,000 years ago. Results show that the forces causing these erruptions move faster than anticipated.
Yellowstone's supervolcano has the ability to expel more than 1,000 cubic kilometers of rock and ash at once-- 2,500 times more material than erupted from Mount St. Helens in 1980, which killed 57 people. This could blanket most of the United States in a thick layer of ash and put Earth into a volcanic winter. New York Times writes "As the research advances, scientists hope they will be able to spot future supereruptions in the making...But understanding the largest eruptions can only help scientists better understand, and therefore forecast, the entire spectrum of volcanic eruptions — something that Dr. Cooper thinks will be possible in a matter of decades" (1). Geologists must figure out what kick starts the rapid movements leading up to supereruptions.
NASA's Osiris-Rex spacecraft captured the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean with Australia in the lower left and the southwestern United States and Baja California in the upper right 106,000 miles away. The spacecraft was launched in September 8, 2016 to collect samples from the asteroid, Bennu, and bring them back to Earth. To get the right trajectory for traveling toward the asteroid, Osiris-Rex needed to fling past Earth. This image was taken as the spacecraft flew past the planet.
Osiris-Rex is on a seven year mission to gather samples from the asteroid that was a building block of our earlier solar system, four and a half billion years ago. Bennu has a fourteen month orbit, that swings close to Earth every six years. Sunlight warms the surface of the asteroid causing a shift in its orbit that could eventually threaten our Earth. The spacecraft will take two years to reach Bennu and then will spend one year to map its surface. During July of 2020, the spacecraft will land on Bennu's surface gathering samples. If all goes as planned, the samples should land on Earth on September 24, 2023. This exposition helps us understand the birth of our solar system as well as learning how to protect Earth from Bennu, who may one day vear too close to home. |
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March 2018
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