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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

The NAVYA. (Credit: Christina Reed) France may be famous for its cheese and wine, but it’s also a longtime leader in driverless transit. Paris boasted one of the earliest models of automatic trains in 1983, when two metro lines ran without a conductor onboard. And the push toward driverless transportation continues in this city, with several planned upgrades before it plays host to the summer Olympics in 2024. So it was with high expectations and a sense of history that I boarded the dri ...read more

The American embassy in Havana, Cuba. (Credit: Shutterstock) U.S.-Cuban relations have taken an unusual turn after several U.S. diplomats, and at least one Canadian diplomat, experienced hearing damage after being targeted by a covert “sonic device” in Havana. Huh? A what? On Wednesday, U.S. officials who spoke to the Washington Post on the condition of anonymity revealed that in the fall on 2016, at least five U.S. diplomats began experiencing unexplainable hearing loss and other ...read more

Rock smashes scissors. Scissors cut paper. Paper covers rock. The rules behind the favorite game of schoolyard kids and adults deciding who takes out the trash are pretty simple. But they also represent a kind of logic problem. Four-year-olds can learn the rules, and so can chimpanzees—but the differences in how kids and apes become proficient reveal a little about how their minds work. The relationship between the three items in rock-paper-scissors is circular. There isn& ...read more

This map from NASA shows the pattern of unusual, record-setting warmth between 2014 and 2016, compared to the long-term average. (Source: NASA GISS) Okay, I admit that I don’t really know the odds of a snowball surviving in hell. But a new study suggests that’s an apt way of describing the chances that 2014 through 2016’s record-setting heat was natural. The study finds that there was a 1 in 3,000 chance that natural causes alone were to blame for the sequence ...read more

A view across the San Francisco Volcanic Field to the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona. Taken by me, March 2017. Welcome to Rocky Planet! This blog is all about the geosciences, from the Earth’s surface down to its core (and even stuff going on off the planet). It is a little tricky to try to describe what you can expect out of Rocky Planet, so why not start with a little about me. I am Dr. Erik Klemetti (you can see me up in the banner, peering out at you). I’m a professor of Geoscie ...read more

Astronomers still don’t know what life might be like — or if it could exist — on planets near twice the size of our own. Would these worlds be toxic wastelands or ocean oases?(NASA/JPL-Caltech/Ames) If you look up at Earth’s night sky and find the constellation Cetus — it looks something like a sea monster — you might also notice a rather average looking star called Tau Ceti. It’s slightly smaller than our sun and sits just 12 light years from Earth. N ...read more

Artist concept of the Sea Dragon in the water. Aerojet via Astronautix. Imagine standing among the small crowd in a viewing gallery aboard a command ship floating 35 miles off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Five miles away you see the upper portion of a rocket bobbing gently, waves lapping at the fuselage. Though isolated at sea there’s a buzz of activity in the air. The conversation on board is punctuated by a loudspeaker booming status updates on the rocket in the water. Finally, an annou ...read more