It has been an unpleasant few weeks here in Colorado. Brutal heat and air pollution have made many of my daily runs along trails like the one above challenging — to put it mildly. Recurrent poor air quality has taken a particular toll. Smoke from eight major wildfires burning in Colorado — more than anywhere else in the contiguous United States right now — has mixedÂ&nbs ...read more

We've made it! The 2018 Geology World Cup Finals are here. One of the semifinal matches was really a squeaker while the other featured a blowout. Final Match: Perú vs. Iceland You'd have to say, Perú was a dark horse in this tournament. This is not to say the country doesn't have spectacular geology, but they took out Russia, Colombia and Croatia to reach the finals. Perú is known for its volcanoes, including the 1600 eruption of Huaynaputina, one of th ...read more

Though it’s been gone for nearly a year, the Cassini spacecraft continues to fuel new studies of Saturn and its many moons. In particular, Cassini’s unique and close-up view of the system during its Grand Finale orbits produced data that have revealed how plasma waves moving outward from the planet interact with both its rings and its moons. Research based on evaluation of the data was published April 26 and June 7 in Geophysical Research Letters. Now, in ...read more

On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits between Java and Sumatra in Indonesia. It was heard 1,300 miles away in the Andaman and Nicobar islands (“extraordinary sounds were heard, as of guns firing�); 2,000 miles away in New Guinea and Western Australia (“a series of loud reports, resembling those of artillery ...read more

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