The two towers of the Schaeberle Camera and the rock wall at Jeur (India), with overlall height lowered by use of a pit for the plate-holder. Credit: Mary Lea Shane Archives
By Dr. Liz MacDonald, founder of Aurorasaurus and scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. This blog reposted from blog.aurorasaurus.org.
Over a century ago, American astronomer W.W. Campbell set up a 40 foot ‘Schaeberle camera’ in Jeur, India to take pictures and study various properties of the su ...read more
That makes last month one of the warmest our planet has experienced since record-keeping began in 1880
This graph shows how each month since 1880 has varied from the annual mean for the entire globe. The curve shows the seasonal cycle, with the warmest temperatures occurring during summer in the Northern Hemisphere. July 2017 tied with July 2016 for the second warmest such month on record — and was one of the warmest months in the record overall. (Source: NASA GISS)
Up in the high north, ...read more
Last year, psychologists B. Keith Payne and colleagues breathed new life into the debate over ‘social priming’ with a paper called Replicable effects of primes on human behavior.
Behavioral or social priming – the idea that subtle cues can exert large, unconscious influences on our behaviour – was a major topic of research for many years, but it’s since been largely discredited. The field’s reputation suffered when Diederik Stapel, a leader in the field, was ...read more
Chilesaurus diegosuarezi, a Jurassic herbivore at the heart of a controversial dinosaur family tree rewrite. (Credit Gabriel Lío)
Remember that paper that dropped a few months ago completely rewriting the dinosaur family tree? Well, the researchers are back, this time using one of the odder dinos out there as evidence for their explosive claim. Is it legit or just hype?
Back in March, researchers argued for a total takedown of the long-established dinosaur family tree.
Today, Matthe ...read more
Psychedelic mushrooms. (Credit: atomazul/Shutterstock)
Scientists have known about psilocybin, the psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms,” ever since Albert Hofmann isolated it in 1958. It’s taken until now, however, for them to figure out how it’s produced.
Researchers at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany sequenced the genomes of two psychedelic mushroom species and used the information to identify four key enzymes involved in the process of ...read more
Volcanologists at the IAVCEI meeting in Portland.
So, this whole week I’ll be taking part in the IAVCEI meeting in Portland, Oregon. Of course, most people have never heard of IAVCEI, which is an abbreviation of the International Association of Volcanology and the Chemistry of the Earth’s Interior (now you can see why we use the abbreviation.) This meeting is bringing together over 1,200 volcanologists and petrologists (who study magma, not petroleum) from all over world to tal ...read more
If you’ve never seen a master lathe operator at work, I highly recommend it. Deft movements and practiced flourishes turn a block of spinning wood into a bedpost, top, bowl or some other circular object, each motion peeling away curls of wood to uncover the beauty hidden inside.
It’s hard to explain why the motions feel so right, but there is an undeniable allure to the work, as if it scratches an itch you didn’t know you had.
As it will, the internet discovered lathe tur ...read more
The summit of Mt. Erebus. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
You could say Antarctica sings a song of fire and ice.
The continent’s frigid reputation is well known, but researchers from the University of Edinburgh analyzed radar scans of the West Antarctic Rift System and found 138 volcanoes hiding under the thick ice sheet. Of those, 91 were previously unidentified, they say, and the discovery could change our understanding of how the overlaying ice layer grows and shrinks.
Hidden Volcanoes
Th ...read more
No sooner had I published my last post, on the much-discussed “women’s brains are more active than men’s” study, than another neuroscience paper triggered a fresh media storm. This time, the subject was videogames, and the headlines were alarming:
Here’s the paper, published in Molecular Psychiatry by University of Montreal researchers Gregory West and colleagues. The truth is that this paper doesn’t say anything about brain “rotting” or “dis ...read more
