More than 18,000 near-Earth asteroids have been identified, and all of them are thought to be remnants of our solar system’s formation. They each have their own unique structure and properties. But despite their distinct variations, we still come across an oddball every once in awhile. On June 26, two separate teams of scientists confirmed an unusual “equal mass� binary asteroid cruising past Earth — one of only four ev ...read more
Like Dorothy coming to Oz, doctors might finally be experiencing their world in color. A new scanner, using technology developed by CERN for detecting subatomic particles, can produce color X-ray scans of the inside of the body, allowing doctors to see soft tissues in unprecedented detail. The technology is set for clinical trials in New Zealand soon. X-ray Upgrade Normal X-rays illuminate our insides in shades of grey — hard tissues like bone are white and soft t ...read more
El Niño's coming. That's the increasingly confident forecast from the U.S. Climate Prediction Center. In its latest monthly report, the CPC continued an El Niño watch and boosted the odds of it developing during the Northern Hemisphere winter of 2018-2019 to 70 percent. Last month, the center pegged El Niño's chances at 65 percent. This is important because El Niño has profound impacts on weather around the world. Here ...read more
From Lenny Bruce to Robin Williams, many great comedians have suffered untimely deaths. But is this actually a hazard of the job? In this study, the authors investigated whether stand-up comedians were more likely to die young compared to comedic or dramatic actors, as well as whether funnier stand-up comedians were more prone to death than less funny comics. The answer to both questions was, unfortunately, yes. Talk about killing it onstage! (Clearly I'll be living for a long time.) ...read more
The discovery of any Earth-like exoplanet evokes excitement in the science community, but the hype is definitely heightened when a possible rocky world is found close to home. Last year, researchers announced the discovery of an exoplanet just 11 light-years from Earth — practically in our own backyard. And now, a detailed study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters reveals crucial details about its composition and potential habitability. ESO’s Hig ...read more
It is hard to believe, but the eruption on the lower East Rift Zone of KÄ«lauea shows no signs of stopping. The lava erupting from Fissure 8 just keeps coming, adding more to the big island of Hawai'i as the lava snakes its way to the Pacific Ocean. Meanwhile, up at the summit of the volcano, the Halema'uma'u Caldera continues to see dramatic changes as the whole surface slowly collapses with the daily explosions and earthquakes. The eruption itself is now the largest known historic e ...read more
On Thursday, researchers announced that they’d caught a single, tiny, high-energy particle called a neutrino that had rained down on Earth from a supermassive black hole some 4 billion light-years away. Astrophysicists are excited because this is only the third identified cosmic object they’ve managed to collect the elusive particles from — first the Sun, then a supernova that went off in a neighboring galaxy in 1987, and now a blazar. S ...read more
Back in 1938, physicist Hans Bethe figured out that the Sun and other stars generate energy by fusing hydrogen into helium. With that mystery solved, solar scientists thought they had a pretty good understanding of what was going on at the heart of the sun. But an experiment that started in 1967 made astronomers just a tad uneasy. While it takes sunlight just eight minutes to travel to Earth, the energy generated in our star’s core needs tens or hundreds of thousands of ye ...read more
Only 4 countries left in the 2018 Geology World Cup! Vote in the semifinal matches! Game 1: Perú vs. Colombia In what is likely a massive upset, Perú snuck by Russia by only a few percentage points. So, now the match for the finals is two South American teams. There isn't a lot that sets Colombia and Perú apart: they both have active volcanoes, they both experience earthquakes, they both host parts of the Andes and parts of the Amazon Basin. Most people li ...read more
Astronomers generally agree that planets form out of the dusty debris disks that surround most newborn stars. When one of these so-called protoplanetary disks rotates around a nascent star, globs of material clump together. Over the course of a few million years, these clumps (called planetesimals) grow larger and larger, forming a protoplanet that eventually clears out its orbital path within the disk. And when a protoplanet gets massive enough, gravity forces it into a spherical shape, fin ...read more