What is this, a “Euthanasia Coaster” for ants? (Credit: Julijonas Urbonas)
I have a friend who loves roller coasters. He once told me, a fellow coaster-head, “You ever get the feeling that most people say they like roller coasters, but then when they’re in a park they just ride one or two of them and call it a day?” I nodded in the shared sentiment.
All of that said, there’s at least one roller coaster that I, or my friend, am not interested in trying out: t ...read more
(Credit: YouTube/Adam Fish)
The eruption of the Agung volcano in Bali, Indonesia has been devastating, particularly for the 55,000 local people who have had to leave their homes and move into shelters. It has also played havoc with the flights in and out of the island, leaving people stranded while the experts try to work out what the volcano will do next.
But this has been a fascinating time for scholars like me who investigate the use of drones in social justice, environmental activism and cr ...read more
The eruption of Agung on November 27, 2017. Michael W. Ishak / Wikimedia Commons.
Monitoring volcanoes is really hard. Not only are you trying to deduce what a volcano is going to do using context clues like earthquakes, gas emissions and deformation, but once an eruption starts, trying to get a peak at what is coming out at the vent is downright dangerous. New technology like drones and satellites have allowed us to more clearly see what is happening where we couldn’t before, and these ne ...read more
A scene from the short documentary film “Nazi VR” that tells of how a virtual recreation of Auschwitz helped convict a Nazi war criminal. Credit: MEL Films
During World War II, Reinhold Hanning served as a guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp where more than 1.1 million people were killed by Nazi Germany. More than 70 years later, a virtual recreation of Auschwitz helped German prosecutors convict Hanning of being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 peopl ...read more
(Credit: kazuend/Unsplash)
Climate change seems inevitable. Between the still-accelerating pace of greenhouse gas emissions and the voices of global warming deniers, hitting the targets laid out in the Paris Accord to slow the pace of a warming climate feels increasingly elusive.
To hit even the 2 degree Celsius cap on a global temperature increase, emissions would need to peak in 2020, or less than three years from now, and keep going down after that. We could do it, but w ...read more
The peer-reviewed report involving 85 scientists finds that the Arctic environmental system has reached a “new normal”
An iceberg off the west coast of Greenland. A new report finds that Arctic warming continues to drive declines in sea ice and ice sheets. (Photo courtesy of Greenland Travel)
It’s a common refrain doubters of human-caused global warming: Temperatures now are no higher than they were during the Medieval Warm Period from about ...read more
Geminids over ESO’s Paranal Observatory in Chile in 2013. (Credit: ESO/G. Lombardi)
Step outside after dark this week and you can watch chunks of an asteroid burn up in Earth’s atmosphere. Behold, the Geminid meteor shower, which is renowned as the year’s best.
At peak Geminids, you could catch a shooting star every minute, and this year the moon won’t be bright enough to foul the show. That main action arrives just past 9 p.m. local time Wednesday and lasts until dawn. ...read more
The “American Wonder” in 1925.
Depending on the vehicle manufacturer, you’ll get a different year for the big roll-out of fully autonomous vehicles. General Motors plans to launch them in big cities by 2019.
Ford says it will have a fully autonomous vehicle in commercial operation by 2021.
Google’s self-driving operation, Waymo, announced last month that its autonomous vehicles are ready to fly solo—sans a test driver babysitter—in an area of the Phoenix met ...read more
Photographer Marat Ahmetvaleev was taking panoramic photos of the winter landscape when he captured this beautiful image of the Chelyabinsk meteoroid as it exploded over Russia in 2013. (Credit: M. Ahmetvaleev/NASA APOD)
On February 15, 2013, a near-Earth asteroid with a diameter of 66 feet (20 meters) entered Earth’s atmosphere traveling at around 40,000 miles per hour (60,0000 km/h).
Within a few seconds, the cosmic projectile detonated 12 miles above the Chelyabinsk region of Russia, r ...read more
A tick grasping a dinosaur feather preserved for posterity in 99 million-year-old Burmese amber. (Credit Peñalver et al 2017, doi: 10.1038/s41467-017-01550-z)
Turns out even dinosaurs got ticked off. A nearly 100 million-year-old piece of amber has preserved a tick latched onto a dinosaur feather, the oldest such preserved specimen of the parasite everyone loves to hate. Additional ticks found in related pieces of amber provide more evidence that the nasty critters were feasting on feath ...read more
