The giant Icelandic volcano Öræfajökull behind Jökulsárlón, a lake created by the meltwater of the Vatnajokull ice cap. Martin Peeks / Wikimedia Commons.
For being an island in the North Atlantic, Iceland has a lot of volcanoes. Some of them generate a lot of anxiety when they have the inevitable rumbles. An earthquake swarm at Katla or Hekla causes all sorts of media alarms to go off … which is surprising considering the last three eruptions in Iceland ...read more
The NOAA-20 satellite was to be the first of four, but the Trump Administration has sought to delay and massively cut the program
The Joint Polar Satellite System-1 lifted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, at 1:47 a.m. PST on Saturday, Nov. 18, 2017. When it successfully reached orbit, it was officially renamed NOAA-20. (Click the image to watch a video of the liftoff.) The satellite is designed to help meteorologists produce more timely and accurate U.S. weather forecas ...read more
An artist’s impression of the asteroid `Oumuamua. It’s around ten times as long as it is wide. (Credit: ESO/M. Kornmesser)
Scientists now have an idea of what the first recorded extra-solar asteroid looked like.
The hunk of rock of that whipped through the solar system in October looks like no other asteroid we’ve seen before, they say, long and thin like a javelin and colored red from millions of years of accumulated radiation exposure. The coloration wasn’t surpr ...read more
(Credit: Pixabay)
Machines are becoming increasingly adept at creating content. Whether it be news articles, poetry, or visual art, computers are learning how to mimic human creativity in novel — and sometimes disturbing — ways.
Text-based content is fairly easy for computers to generate. Anyone who has used a smartphone to text knows that operating systems are pretty savvy in predicting speech patterns. But videos and other visual mediums are a little more challenging — not ...read more
Damage from the November 2017 M7.3 earthquake near the Iran/Iraq border. Farzad Menati / Wikimedia Commons
If you’ve seen the news over the weekend, you might have seen a bevy of article proclaiming that 2018 will see a big surge on M7+ earthquakes. My first reaction was “ugh” and the next was “sigh”. I thought that yet again the media was being duped by crackpots trying to sell some snake oil prediction scheme.
However, that first pass may have been misguided, but ...read more
(Credit: Tesla)
Elon Musk finally revealed the Tesla Semi, an electric big-rig he professes will outstrip the diesel fleets that have dominated American freight for decades.
The Tesla CEO flaunted his latest creation and its “BAMF performance”—it’s a technical term, he says—at an unveiling ceremony Thursday night in Hawthorne, CA. He outlined the semi’s specs, which include parlor tricks like going from 0-60 mph in 5 seconds and potentially industry-upending ...read more
A portrait of the world’s most recognizable person, Jesus Christ, painted by an icon whose renown doesn’t trail too far behind, Leonardo da Vinci, on Wednesday sold at auction for $450.3 million, setting a new record for artistic largesse.
Only a handful of authentic da Vinci paintings exist today, and Salvator Mundi is the only one that could still be purchased by a deep-pocketed collector. Christie’s Auction House billed the work as “The Last da Vinci,” “th ...read more
(Credit: Gustav Gullstrand/Unsplash)
Antarctica, a land of near-lunar desolation and conditions so bleak few plants or animals dare stay, was once covered with a blanket of lush greenery.
The conception of the ice-coated continent as a forested Eden emerged in the early 1900s when Robert Falcon Scott, a British explorer, found plant fossils during an expedition to the South Pole. Now, researchers working in the Trans-Antarctic mountains, where they may be the first to tread ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Charles Darwin was a busy man.
When he wasn’t advancing his groundbreaking theory of evolution by natural selection, he could be found carefully analyzing the contents of bird vomit and droppings. No, this wasn’t an obscure hobby. He was getting his hands dirty to stack up more evidence to support one of his many hypotheses.
He suspected that some birds had an unusual way of transporting plants to new locations. “Freshwater fish, I find, eat seeds of ma ...read more
