Sci-tech
Stephen Hawking's voice beamed into space during Westminster Abbey memorial service
More than 1,000 people are due Friday at a service of thanksgiving for the physicist, who died in March at 76 after decades of living with motor neuron disease . Hawking's daughter Lucy described the music to accompany the physicist's words as a "beautiful and symbolic gesture that creates a link between our father's presence on this planet, his wish to go into space and his explorations of the ... [Full Article...]
Antarctica Has Lost 3 Trillion Tonnes of Ice Since '92
Antarctica has enough ice to raise seas by 190 feet if it ever all melted, dwarfing frozen stores in places from Greenland to the Himalayas and making its future the biggest uncertainty in understanding global warming and ocean levels. "The power of this research is that it brings together independent methods and results from a collection of different teams throughout the world", noted Twila Moon... [Full Article...]
North America to Hold the 2026 FIFA World Cup
FIFA's official list for the 2018 World Cup showed nine of the 32 teams chose base camps separate from any of the tournament venues, some of them in cities with fewer than 100,000 residents. The 2026 World Cup could turn out to be one of the most significant developments to American soccer in a long time. Bid leader Cordeiro said his team was "humbled" by the result and predicted the tou... [Full Article...]
Antarctica is losing ice at an increasingly rapid rate
Shepherd says they've seen the most dramatic effects in West Antarctica , where the ice sheet rests on the sea bed. "Since around 2010, 2012, we can see that there's been a sharp increase in the rate of ice loss from Antarctica". A new climate assessment called the Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE) found a startling rise in sea level. They also said governments should tak... [Full Article...]
NASA rover knocked out as very big dust storm envelops Mars
Scientists think the power level in Opportunity's batteries is below 24 volts. By the following day, the opacity of the storm (a technical measure of how much light it blocks) had reached record levels, such that Opportunity's instruments could no longer measure it effectively. [Full Article...]
Massive dust storm on Mars suspends NASA's Opportunity rover from science work
The 2007 storm produced a tau value of 5.5, while the current storm has already produced a tau of 10.8. A statement put out by the space agency has detailed the circumstances that Opportunity is facing now. By Wednesday (June 6), Opportunity's power levels saw a major drop, forcing the rover to stop all science to conserve power. Another dust storm in 2007 forced the rover to hunker down for t... [Full Article...]
Rep. Marcy Kaptur attempts crackdown on EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt's pen costs
Don Beyer in a letter to the FBI and Justice Department , which requests an investigation into Pruitt. An EPA spokesman referred a request for comment Friday to Pruitt's outside lawyer, who did not respond. "I mean, look, my wife is an entrepreneur herself". EPA spokeswoman Kelsi Daniell provided the Post with a statement in response to the newspaper's story that said, "Administrator Pr... [Full Article...]
French farmers call for pursuit of fuel blockades
French farmers began a blockade of oil refineries and fuel depots on Sunday evening over plans by Total to use imported palm oil at a biofuel plant, which have fanned farmers' anger over unfair competition. Separately, junior minister Brune Poirson, who reports to environment minister Nicolas Hulot, said on Twitter that " France wants to stop the rise in use from one year to the other" for both... [Full Article...]
Category 3 Hurricane Bud heads north off Mexican coast
Forecasters said the storm could strengthen a bit more before a slow weakening trend started Tuesday. At Category 3, Bud was classified as a major hurricane. Hurricane-force winds are extended outward up to 35 miles from the hurricane center, with tropical storm-force winds extended outward up to 125 miles. [Full Article...]
ISRO’s PRL scientists discover an ‘EPIC’ planet
A scientific team lead by Professor Abhijit Chakraborty of Physical Research Laboratory ( PRL ), Ahmedabad has made a remarkable discovery. Scientists have named the host star as EPIC 211945201 or K2-236 and the planet as EPIC 211945201b or K2-236b. [Full Article...]
It's World Oceans Day and the focus is on plastic pollution
It can be achieved through exhorting people to join various ventures that work towards a clean and green planet. Watch out for further details of #BeatPlasticPollution campaigns over the coming weeks. Oceans connect all of us, linking people and nations in cultural ties, and they are essential for sharing goods and services across the world. Then, with rising sea levels, we can expect more and... [Full Article...]
NASA finds curious new clues to life on Mars
Kate further argues that the finding of ancient organics ascertain that the fundamental conditions for life formation did exist on Mars about 3.5 billion years ago and their current existence is because of the absence of an outside force such as ultraviolet light that can destroy them completely. [Full Article...]
Lightning On Jupiter Is Stunningly Similar To The Lightning Storms On Earth
The first time you approach the planet, the spacecraft has recorded 377 of the lightning discharges, such as those that occur on Earth. This is far more than earlier spacecraft could detect. In a nutshell, what NASA has found is that the lightning on Jupiter is strikingly similar to lightning on Earth in terms of frequency. Juno has been returning stunning close-up pictures of Jupiter since th... [Full Article...]
Half-billion-year-old fossils are the oldest animal footprints ever found
An global team of scientists has recently uncovered what they believe are the earliest animal fossil footprints on record, Phys.org reports . This new discovery is not providing scientists with all the needed information, so for now we can not really determine what type of animal the footprints might have belonged to. [Full Article...]
Astronauts launching to International Space Station
According to Pew Research Center , 65 percent of Americans think it is essential that NASA stays involved in space exploration. The astronaut-carrying version of the Dragon includes seven seats, a bank of monitors offering the crew real-time flight data, a climate-control system for added comfort, and plenty of windows so the space travelers can gaze in awe at the stunning scenery. [Full Article...]
NASA observes the formation of Tropical Storm Aletta
The study in the journal Nature , finds a 10 percent slowdown in storm speed between 1949 and 2016. The unusually slow-moving Hurricane Harvey was a recent example. Dr Christina Patricola , from the Climate and Ecosystems Sciences Division at University California, Davis, says the findings raise several questions, especially regarding "stalled" tropical cyclones. [Full Article...]
Calgary company can capture Carbon dioxide at a cost of $94 per ton
United Nations reports indicate that governments may have to deploy such novel technologies this century to remove carbon from nature and bury it to limit global warming under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. The company says their immediate goal is to produce synthetic liquid fuels made from carbon and renewable energy. That footprint would shrink further if the plant were all-electric. [Full Article...]
Curiosity's onboard labs back in action after a year offline
The new results of the Rover's work on Mars will be released in the journal Science tomorrow at 2 p.m. ET, which is also when NASA will air a live discussion of those findings. The inlets lead to Curiosity's onboard laboratories. "The science team was convinced that the engineers could deliver-so Convinced we drove back into some website that we overlooked drilling ahead". [Full Article...]
80 plastic bags clog stomach of dead whale
At least 300 marine animals including pilot whales , sea turtles and dolphins, perish each year in Thai waters after ingesting plastic. The whale was seen along the coast of southern Thailand in Songkhla Province on May 28th appearing ill and unable to swim. [Full Article...]
These Are The Oldest Animal Footprints Ever Discovered on Our Planet
They are often assumed to have appeared and radiated suddenly during the so-called " Cambrian Explosion " about 541 to 510 million years ago, but scientists now tend to consider that their evolutionary ancestry was rooted in the Ediacaran Period. [Full Article...]