(Credit: zizar/Shutterstock)
Should I stay, or should I go? It’s a question we might imagine birds asking themselves every time the seasons change. Many, of course, do decide to leave, packing up for warmer or cooler climes, depending on the time of year.
But many, the majority, in fact, don’t migrate. The old adage might be true after all. If you stay there will be trouble — but if you go, it’ll be double.
Clash of Opinions
What then, is the deciding factor for the bir ...read more
Temperature anomalies at Earth’s surface for April 2018 relative to the April average for the period 1981-2010. (Source: European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts, Copernicus Climate Change Service. Adapted by ImaGeo)
Some regions of the world shivered last month. But as was the case in March, most of the planet continued to be unusually warm.
You can see the pattern in the map above showing temperature anomalies for April, produced by Europe’s Copernicus Climate Chang ...read more
A new scandal hit the world of psychology last week when it emerged that Robert J. Sternberg, an eminent experimental psychologist and former President of the American Psychological Association (APA), has been engaging in text recycling aka self-plagiarism.
It has emerged that Sternberg re-used large chunks of previously published text in several publications without any acknowledgement that this done. This discovery came after Sternberg was already under scrutiny for a very high rate of self- ...read more
A fictional killer robot in the film “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.” In reality, researchers are less worried about a robot uprising and more concerned about how development of lethal autonomous weapons that take responsibility for killing out of human hands. Credit: Studio Canal | Carolco Pictures
Notable tech leaders and scientists have signed open letter petitions calling for a ban on lethal autonomous weapons powered by artificial intelligence technologies. But a group ...read more
[Editor’s note: So, it turns out that there are actually two species of goblin spider named after David Attenborough! I already written about one, Prethopalpus attenboroughi, but I’ve just stumbled across another. It’s cool, and also a weird coincidence — though, to be fair, the papers describing the species do share a coauthor. Big David Attenborough fan, I guess. In any case, it’s cringe-y enough when you’re the new guy in the office and someone already has ...read more
Holding the current bottle of peanuts in the MSA. Teitel.
Next to the Deep Space Network’s main control room at JPL is the aptly named Mission Supply Area. It’s an area used for major mission events like launches, landings, and orbit insertion burns, and if you go there on a tour someone will offer you peanuts. It’s tradition, a tradition that gained a lot of popularity when the world watched engineers eating peanuts during Curiosity’s 2012 landing on Mars. There’s ...read more
In the 1970s, the original version of the Voyager mission was supposed to include a Pluto flyby–and Alan Stern worked through many failed attempts to launch a Pluto mission in the decades since. (Graphic: Jason Davis/The Planetary Society)
On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft swept past Pluto, returning eye-popping images of the dwarf planet and its huge (relatively speaking) moon, Charon. At the time, the best existing images of Pluto showed nothing more than an enigmatic blur. ...read more
A bright tangle of magnetic field lines has appeared on its surface. But otherwise the Sun is singularly serene. What’s going on?
View of the Sun from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory
The other day, NASA posted this closeup view of the Sun under the headline: “Tangled Up in Blue.”
The reference to the Bob Dylan tune aside, I found the video particularly intriguing. That’s because the Sun’s surface, as imaged here by the Solar Dynami ...read more
